Stela Silva, Ph.D., an astrophysicist in the NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, has her eye to the sky, sort of. Working with gravitational microlensing, which she says is “the physical phenomenon that happens when we’re observing a star and then another star with a planet passes in front of it,” and machine learning she looks for signatures of exoplanets. The chance of finding a star is one in a million, Silva says, and she and her fellow researchers look at millions of stars at the same time trying to detect exoplanets. Silva grew up in Brazil, where NASA seemed as far away as the stars she now studies. But she and her grandfather shared a loved of astronomy, and she worked hard toward her dream of being at NASA.
To learn more about the NASA NPP Program, visit https://npp.orau.org/. The deadline for the March 2026 application cycle has been extended to 5 p.m. ET on Thursday, April 2, 2026.
