Stephen Erik Thorsett (born December 3, 1964) is an American academic and astronomer serving as the president of Willamette University.
[1] Following high school, he attended Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics in 1987, graduating summa cum laude.
[1][3] Thorsett then pursued graduate studies at Princeton University, where he received a Ph.D. in physics in 1991 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "Observing millisecond and binary pulsars", under the supervision of Dan Stinebring and Joseph Taylor.
[6] In 2004, with collaborators Ingrid Stairs and Zaven Arzoumanian, he made the first measurement of gravitational spin-orbit coupling in a binary system.
[7] He helped discover the oldest known extrasolar planet and was the first to suggest that a nearby gamma-ray burst might cause a mass extinction event.