Northwestern University astrophysicist Allison Strom has received a 2024 Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. The prestigious fellowship includes an unrestricted grant of $875,000 over five years to pursue innovative and experimental research. 
The foundation named Strom and 19 other junior faculty members as the nation’s most innovative early-career scientists and engineers.
“The Packard Fellowship affords me and my group the opportunity to explore new directions by combining different expertise from across astronomy and astrophysics,” Strom said. “As a Packard Fellow, I am excited to study the role massive stars in early universe play in shaping the evolution of galaxies — and how we can use these galaxies as laboratories to study stellar astrophysics.”
Strom is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) and the NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky (SkAI).
“This extraordinary class of Fellows joins the community of Packard Fellows who are pushing the boundaries of innovation and discovery to contribute to science and engineering in ways that make a real difference to our world,” said Richard Alley, chair of the Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering Advisory Panel and 1991 Packard Fellow. “We look forward to welcoming them to the Packard Fellows community and supporting them as they collaborate, learn and create the future together.”
There are billions of galaxies in the universe, each with its own unique combination of traits. Using the largest telescopes in the world, Strom’s research group observes galaxies throughout cosmic history to determine their internal properties and growth histories. Her goal is to understand why galaxies follow different evolutionary paths.
As part of this work, Strom leads the CECILIA (Chemical Evolution Constrained using Ionized Lines in Interstellar Aurorae) Survey, which uses NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study the chemistry of distant galaxies. Named after Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, one of the first women to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy, the CECILIA Survey observes the spectra (or amount of light across different wavelengths) from distant galaxies to decipher their chemical composition.
“One of the principal goals of modern astronomy is to understand how galaxies formed and evolved in the early universe,” Strom said. “A key piece of evidence is what those galaxies are made of. With CECILIA, we have a chance to directly measure the chemistry of distant galaxies, using an incredibly powerful method that is only possible with JWST. CECILIA will be the cipher, like the Rosetta Stone, that enables astronomers to crack the code and accurately interpret the thousands of other spectra of distant galaxies that JWST will observe throughout its lifetime.”