Incoming Scholar Receives 2026 NASA Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship
This fall, astrophysicist James Beattie will begin his Membership in the Institute's School of Natural Sciences as a Hubble Fellow. His appointment is part of the NASA Hubble Fellowship Program (NHFP), which "supports promising postdoctoral scientists to pursue independent research which contributes to NASA astrophysics, using theory, observation, experimentation, or instrument development."
The work of Hubble Fellows is broadly characterized by the driving question, "How did we get here?" Beattie will address this question through his selected proposal, titled "The Glue Between the Stars: Unraveling Turbulence and Magnetism across All Scales."
Beattie’s research will span physical scales ranging from galactic turbulence to compact object mergers. He aims to uncover the universal laws that govern how energy and magnetic fields evolve in turbulent astrophysical plasmas. To do this, he will develop the next generation of GPU-enabled simulations of supernova-driven turbulence, investigating how instabilities in supernova remnants can spontaneously generate magnetic fields and potentially magnetize the early universe through the very first stellar explosions. Additionally, he will pursue the first non-ideal relativistic magnetohydrodynamics simulations of plasma in merging binary neutron stars, building predictive models for the saturation of some of the strongest magnetic fields in the universe.
Beattie will bring a unique, multidisciplinary background to the Institute. After initially studying biology and computing, he returned to university to earn a double degree in applied mathematics and physics, ultimately pursuing astrophysics.
He went on to earn his Ph.D. from the Australian National University in 2024, with research focused on magnetization, turbulence, and cosmic-ray transport in the interstellar medium. Prior to his Hubble Fellowship at IAS, Beattie was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and held a joint postdoctoral position at Princeton University and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) at the University of Toronto.
Read more about the 2026 NASA Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowships on the NASA website.
