Victoria Ashley Villar is an astrophysicist. She studies the death of stars and their by-products. Villar is an assistant professor at Harvard University.^[1]

This biographical article is written like a résumé. (April 2024)

Villar attended high school at Vero Beach High School in Florida.^[2] She received her Bachelor of Science in Physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a minor in mathematics in 2014, and continued her Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Harvard University in 2020.^[1]

During Villar's undergraduate year, she wrote her senior thesis on asteroseismology with the assistance of professors John Johnson and Josh Winn.^[2] Villar was a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University after earning her PhD from Harvard University.

• Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University (2023 - Present)
• Assistant Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State (2021-2023) where she was the inaugural Mercedes Richards Career Development Professor.^[2]
• Simons Junior Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University and the Flatiron Institute (2020-2021)
• U.S. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2020)

Villar has received many awards, prizes, and honors over the span of her career. Her awards include:

• APS Minority Scholarship (2010-2014)
• MIT Joel Matthew Orloff Award (2014)^[3]
• MIT Albert G. Hill Prize (2014)^[4]
• Harvard James Mills Peirce Fellowship (2014)^[5]
• National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2014-2017)
• Harvard Merit/ Graduate Society Research Fellowship (2018)
• MIT/Stanford Rising Star Physics (2019)
• Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship (2019-2020)^[6]
• Cell 100 Inspiring Hispanic/Latinx Scientists in America (2020)^[7]
• Forbes 30 Under 30 (Science Category) (2022)^[8]