Prof. Offner's research focuses on understanding how stars like the Sun form by combining numerical simulations, observations and observational modeling. She is also interested in applying statistical techniques and machine learning to parse data and identify the physical characteristics of forming stars. She is a core faculty member in the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Science (specifically the Center for Scientific Machine Learning), and a member of the Center for Planetary Systems Habitability and the Machine Learning Laboratory.

Prof. Offner received her bachelor's degrees in physics and mathematics from Wellesley College in 2003 and completed a Ph.D. in physics at the University of California at Berkeley in 2009. From 2009-2012 she was an NSF Astronomy & Astrophysics prize postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a NASA Hubble prize postdoctoral fellow at Yale from 2012-2014. Before joining the astronomy faculty at UT Austin in 2017, she was an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.