Krzysztof Stanek, Distinguished Scholar and professor with the Department of Astronomy at Ohio State, is known for his research on the explosive deaths of massive stars. He and collaborators have shown conclusively that gamma-ray bursts are directly linked to the deaths of massive stars and pioneered the use of red clump stars as a distance indicator in the Galaxy and beyond.
He is also principal investigator of the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN), a worldwide network of telescopes based at Ohio State that monitors transients over the entire visible sky every night at about 50,000 times deeper than the human eye. The ASAS-SN is the world leader in the discovery of bright supernovae, finding nearly 1,100 since its first observations in 2014. Along with Christopher Kochanek, professor of astronomy and Ohio Eminent Scholar, they jointly received the American Astronomical Society’s 2020 Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize for their innovative contributions to time-domain astronomy and, in particular, their leadership in the ASAS-SN.
Stanek is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His honors include a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Polish Astronomical Society Young Astronomer Award and a Harvard-Smithsonian CfA Postdoctoral Fellowship.