Anna Rosen

I am a computational astrophysicist and Assistant Professor of Astronomy at San Diego State University. I study how stars — especially massive stars and the clusters they are born in — form, reshape their surroundings through feedback, and imprint themselves on the stellar populations we observe. Increasingly, my group builds the differentiable scientific software needed to connect those models to real survey data, and to ask what that data can genuinely tell us.

My early work used radiation-magnetohydrodynamic simulations to show how massive stars keep accreting against their own radiation, winds, and outflows, and how feedback from young clusters carves bubbles and stirs turbulence in the interstellar medium. That work now drives a broader program: the Jaxstro ecosystem — a JAX-native, differentiable pipeline from a cluster's birth to its survey observables, built to make astrophysical inference rigorous and its limits honest.

My own path ran through community college: I transferred from Los Angeles Pierce College to UC Berkeley, earned my Ph.D. at UC Santa Cruz, and held NASA Einstein and ITC fellowships at Harvard and NSF and UC Chancellor's fellowships at UC San Diego before joining SDSU in 2023. At a Hispanic-Serving Institution, I mentor students — including community-college transfer students — and build glass-box, well-documented software so that doing real computational science is open to newcomers, not gated behind undocumented research code.