Steven Balbus

Steven Andrew Balbus In 2013, he shared the Shaw Prize for Astronomy with John F. Hawley. He attended the William Penn Charter School, received S.B. degrees in mathematics and in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1975, and a PhD in theoretical astrophysics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981, under the supervision of Christopher McKee.

Research and career Following his PhD, Balbus held postdoctoral research appointments at MIT and Princeton University. He has made discoveries related to gravitational instability in the interstellar medium and several contributions to the theory of thermal processes in magnetised dilute plasmas. In 2013, he shared the Shaw Prize in Astronomy with Hawley for their work on the MRI.

Balbus is the recipient of a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, and has held visiting faculty positions at Princeton University (Bohdan Paczynski Visitor and Spitzer Lecturer, 2011) and the University of California, Berkeley (Visiting Miller Professor, 2012). In April 2015, Balbus was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2016. In 2020 he was awarded the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, and in 2021 the Dirac Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics. In 2023 he was awarded the Nick Kylafis Lectureship