UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — David Radice, associate professor of physics and of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, has been named the Henry W. Knerr Early Career Professor of Physics. Geroge R. and Lisabeth Knerr Poore established the professorship in 2021 in honor of Henry Knerr to support early-career faculty in the Eberly College of Science. The professorship offers recognition for outstanding early accomplishments and provides financial support to encourage promising young faculty members to establish a commitment to teaching and explore new areas of research.
Radice focuses his research on the study of explosive astrophysical events that produce gravitational waves and light, such as neutron-star mergers and core-collapse supernovae. He combines observations of these events with large-scale supercomputing simulations to better understand these astrophysical events. He is also interested in the development of new computational techniques and in the understanding of fundamental physics questions such as the nature of turbulence.
“David is an accomplished theorist, and his research group is one of very few worldwide that is capable of performing such sophisticated large-scale simulations of the collision of astrophysical objects,” said Mauricio Terrones, head of the Penn State Department of Physics. “He has an impressive record of publications and is one of the most highly cited theorists in his field. Additionally, he cares deeply for his students and their learning and is an excellent mentor. We are thrilled to recognize David with the Knerr Early Career Professorship.”
Radice was recently awarded a grant from NASA to advance an open-source code called AthenaK for computational astrophysicists. The code provides an infrastructure for astrophysical simulations, used, for example, to model the distribution of dark matter or what happens when cosmic objects collide. Radice is also a member of the U.S. National Science Foundation–funded Nuclear Physics from Multi-Messenger Mergers (NP3M) Focus Research Hub, a multi-institution collaboration that takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying the properties of hot, dense nuclear matter like that found in neutron stars.
Radice’s honors and awards include a New Initiatives grant from the Charles E. Kaufman Foundation in 2024, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2022, an Early Career Research Program Award from the Department of Energy in 2020, a Giulio Rampa Thesis Prize from the University of Pavia in 2014, and a Prize Postdoctoral Fellowship from the California Institute of Technology in 2013.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Radice was an associate research scholar at Princeton University and at the Institute for Advanced Study from 2016 to 2019 and a Walter Burke Fellow in Theoretical Astrophysics and Relativity at the California Institute of Technology from 2013 to 2016. He earned a doctoral degree in gravitational wave astronomy at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Germany, in 2013 and master’s and bachelor’s degrees in mathematical engineering at Politecnico di Milanoin Italy in 2009 and 2006, respectively.
Henry W. Knerr joined the faculty at Penn State in 1936 and served as a professor of physics and associate dean of the graduate school at Penn State. His primary research interest centered on microwave adsorption and dispersion in water, and he also explored challenges with teaching physics. Knerr retired from Penn State in 1968.