Steven Balbus

Steven Andrew Balbus is an American astrophysicist born November 23, 1953 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Savilian Professor of Astronomy Emeritus at the University of Oxford and a senior research fellow at New College, Oxford. He earned degrees from MIT and the University of California, Berkeley, held postdoctoral positions at MIT and Princeton, and taught at the University of Virginia from 1985 and at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris from 2004 before moving to Oxford in 2012 and retiring in 2024; his research centers on gravitational instability and the magnetorotational instability, and he has written a textbook on general relativity and cosmology. He shared the 2013 Shaw Prize in Astronomy with John F. Hawley.