Prof. dr. E. (Else) Starkenburg

Dr. Else Starkenburg is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Science and Engineering. Her research interests concern the early history of the Milky Way and surrounding galaxies. She uses photometric and spectroscopic observations as well as modelling to study these systems. Several of her projects focus on the first generations of stars in these systems, which contain valuable information about our galaxy’s childhood as well as conditions in the early universe in general. The search for such most pristine (and presumably extremely old) stars has justifiably been compared with finding needles in a haystack as these stars are extremely rare.

She is the founder and Principal Investigator for the "Pristine Survey", an international collaboration uncovering and studying these rare earliest-generation stars in the Galaxy with unprecedented efficiency and success. She is also deeply involved in upcoming and future instrumentation and surveys in her field, for instance as co-lead for one of the ten 4MOST consortium surveys and co-lead for the very metal-poor (early generation) star working group for the WEAVE spectrograph.

Being a member of the YAG as well as the National Jonge Akademie of KNAW, Else hopes to contribute to the coordination between national and Groningen-centered efforts to improve academia, especially for young researchers. She is also very interested in connections between research and art.