Susan Clark

Susan Clark is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Stanford University and a Senior Member of KIPAC (Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology). She leads the Cosmic Magnetism & Interstellar Physics research group and serves as co-director of the Center for Decoding the Universe at Stanford. Her research focuses on understanding astrophysical magnetism and the physics of the interstellar medium across multiple scales, from diffuse gas to dense star-forming regions.

Clark received her Ph.D. in 2017 from Columbia University as an NSF Graduate Fellow, following undergraduate studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on a Morehead-Cain scholarship. Prior to joining Stanford in September 2021, she was a NASA Hubble Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Her research tackles fundamental questions about the structure of the Milky Way's magnetic field, the nature of interstellar turbulence, and the role of magnetism in star formation. Clark and her group decipher the magnetic interstellar medium using multiwavelength observations and innovative data analysis techniques, employing tracers including gas line emission and absorption, polarized dust and synchrotron emission, starlight polarization, Zeeman splitting, and Faraday rotation. Her work has significant implications for cosmic microwave background research, particularly in understanding and removing galactic foregrounds.

Clark collaborates on numerous major telescope projects including the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), Simons Observatory (SO), CMB-S4, CCAT-Prime, LiteBIRD, and the Galactic Australian SKA Pathfinder (GASKAP). She co-founded the Pan-Experiment Galactic Science Group to facilitate Milky Way science with CMB experiment data.

• 2025 AAS Warner Prize
• 2024 Sloan Research Fellowship
• Unsung Hero Award (2019) for prison teaching work

Clark mentors a large research group comprising postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduate researchers. Her group's work is funded by grants from the NSF and NASA. Beyond research, Clark is committed to teaching and outreach, having previously taught through the Princeton Prison Teaching Initiative and expressing enthusiasm for making STEM more inclusive. She particularly enjoys teaching courses related to radiative processes, fluid dynamics, and the interstellar medium.

The Cosmic Magnetism & Interstellar Physics group maintains active collaborations across multiple institutions and telescope facilities worldwide, with particular emphasis on developing new data analysis techniques for studying magnetic fields in both galactic and extragalactic contexts.