AstroNuc 2026: Prize Fellow Aldana Grichener organizes a packed astrophysics workshop
Aldana Grichener, Prize Fellow in Theoretical & Computational Astrophysics, organizes a growing nuclear astrophysics workshop that brings together theorists, observers, and experimentalists to tackle some of the Universe's most fundamental questions.
Explore the tutorials from the workshop here!
Where do the atoms in your body come from? How was gold forged, or uranium? These questions sit at the heart of nuclear astrophysics — a field that traces the origin of every element in the periodic table through the lives and deaths of stars. This March, Steward Observatory's own Aldana Grichener is hosting AstroNuc 2026: Nuclear Astrophysics Workshop: Nucleosynthesis from Stars to Galaxies, a multi-day workshop designed to push the frontiers of this fast-moving field.
What began as a focused gathering has grown steadily in size and ambition. The workshop brings together a diverse mix of faculty, postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and even a cohort of ambitious undergraduates, drawn from across theoretical, observational, and experimental astrophysics communities.
AstroNuc 2026 is deliberately structured to be more than a series of lectures. The program combines longer overview talks from senior researchers, shorter contributed presentations, open discussion sessions, and hands-on practical workshops led by developers of widely used open-source codes.
“The goal is to discuss recent advancements in stellar and explosive nucleosynthesis and enrichment, highlight opportunities opened by new time-domain astronomy initiatives, and explore how we can leverage nuclear experiments to make advancements in the field of nuclear astrophysics,” said Aldana of the upcoming workshop. “The format will be highly interactive, combining talks, discussions and hands-on introductory sessions to numerical tools."
The hands-on sessions are a particularly distinctive feature of this year's program, offering early-career researchers a practical introduction to the tools of the discipline. For graduate students and postdocs taking their first steps in nuclear astrophysics, these sessions offer rare direct access to the codebases and methodologies that underpin modern research.
Aldana's own research exemplifies the broad scope of the workshop. She studies how elements are forged inside massive stars before they detonate as supernovae, and how the heaviest elements in nature — gold, uranium, and others — are produced in violent stellar collisions. To pursue these problems, she draws on a wide toolkit: detailed stellar modeling, galactic chemical evolution simulations, and machine learning emulators designed to accelerate the notoriously expensive calculations of stellar nucleosynthesis.
The timing of AstroNuc 2026 is no accident. A convergence of powerful new observatories is delivering data that makes the field more exciting — and more demanding — than ever before.
The James Webb Space Telescope and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) are transforming astronomers' ability to observe transient phenomena — stellar explosions, neutron star mergers, and other fleeting events that are the primary forges of heavy elements. Meanwhile, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's fifth installment (SDSS-V) is mapping the chemical composition of stars across the sky on an unprecedented scale. All of this new data requires a solid theoretical and experimental nuclear physics foundation to interpret. “These are exciting times to be working in this field," Aldana said.
Beyond the exchange of scientific results, Aldana has ambitious goals for what AstroNuc 2026 will set in motion. The workshop aims to help researchers across subdisciplines develop a common language and shared infrastructure — reducing the friction that often slows cross-disciplinary science. Among the concrete initiatives she hopes to launch: an open-source code for modeling chemical enrichment across cosmic time, and a joint public database linking experimental nuclear data to computational nucleosynthesis studies.
The workshop's impact is also designed to extend beyond the participants in the room. After the event concludes, Aldana plans to release "Video Proceedings" — recordings of the overview talks and hands-on sessions made freely available to the broader community. Speakers have been encouraged to pitch their talks at a level accessible to researchers entering a new subfield, making the recordings a lasting educational resource.