Paula Jofré, 36
Galactic and stellar astrophysics
Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile
Paula Jofré wants to map the galactic lineage of every star in the Milky Way. It’s like tracing your family tree, if your grandparents were supernovas.
Jofré, 36, is an astrophysicist at Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile, where she studies the inner lives and histories of stars. She measures the wavelengths of the light that stars emit to figure out which chemical elements the stars contain, and in what proportions.
Then she does something unusual: She borrows a technique from biology to trace the stars’ evolution. Much like an archaeologist examining the DNA in ancient human remains to trace a population’s history, Jofré uses modern stars’ contents to track how their stellar ancestors moved around the Milky Way. Her best-known work, and the research of which she’s most proud, uses those elements as a proxy for DNA to chart the first family tree of the Milky Way’s stars.