Karen Bjorkman

AURA Board Chair

University of Toledo

Karen Bjorkman received a B.S. in Physics from Univ. North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and M.S. and Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Univ. Colorado, Boulder. She was a staff scientist at Univ. Wisconsin, Madison for 7 years before moving to Univ. of Toledo, where she rose through the faculty ranks. There she also served as Department Chair, College Dean, and Provost before returning to her faculty role, from which she recently retired. Her research area is the circumstellar disks and winds of massive stars. She uses both space- and ground-based data, including spectropolarimetry, to study these objects. Karen Bjorkman is a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.