Steven Balbus
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Steven Balbus FRS |
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Steven Balbus at the Royal Society admissions day in London in 2016
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| Born | 23 November 1953 |
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| Website | www2 |
Steven Andrew Balbus FRS (born 23 November 1953) is an American-born astrophysicist who is the Savilian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow at New College, Oxford. In 2013, he shared the Shaw Prize for Astronomy with John F. Hawley.
Balbus was born in 1953 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He attended the William Penn Charter School, received S.B. degrees in mathematics and in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1975, and a PhD in theoretical astrophysics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981.
Following his PhD, Balbus held postdoctoral research appointments at MIT and Princeton University. In 1985, Balbus joined the faculty of the University of Virginia. In 2004, he was appointed Professeur des Universités in the Physics Department of the École Normale Supérieure de Paris. He remained in Paris until 2012, when he moved to Oxford as the Savilian Professor of Astronomy. At Oxford, he teaches astrophysical gas dynamics and supervises postdoctoral researchers and students.
Balbus' research is in theoretical astrophysics. He has made discoveries related to gravitational instability in the interstellar medium and several contributions to the theory of thermal processes in magnetised dilute plasmas. He is best known for a 1991 paper, published with former colleague John F. Hawley, describing what is now known as magnetorotational instability (MRI). Most recently, Balbus has been working on a theory of the Sun's internal rotation. As of 2016, Balbus has also been lecturing an undergraduate course in general relativity at the University of Oxford; with several lectures coinciding with the discovery of gravitational waves in February 2016.
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