Smadar Naoz

Smadar Naoz is a professor of physics and astronomy and the Howard and Astrid Preston Chair in Astrophysics at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a theoretical astrophysicist who studies how gravity affects systems across a wide range of scales: from planets orbiting nearby stars to black holes and the first galaxies in the Universe.

Naoz is especially known for her work on the dynamics of systems containing three gravitationally interacting objects, known as the three-body problem. Naoz contributed to the development of the theoretical framework for understanding these interactions and demonstrated their importance in explaining a wide variety of astronomical phenomena. Her research has shed light on the unexpected orbits of planets beyond our Solar System, the evolution and mergers of stars and black holes, sources of gravitational waves, and the behavior of objects near the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies.

She also studies how the first stars, galaxies, and dense stellar systems formed in the early Universe, including how the relative motion of ordinary matter and dark matter influenced the earliest cosmic structures. Across these areas, her group combines analytical theory with numerical simulations to connect fundamental physics with astronomical observations.

Naoz is deeply committed to mentoring the next generation of scientists and to broadening participation in physics and astronomy. Her honors include the American Astronomical Society’s Annie Jump Cannon Award and Helen B. Warner Prize, a Sloan Research Fellowship, and election as a Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Astronomical Society, as well as UCLA’s Undergraduate Research Week Faculty Mentor Award.