Stefanie Fijma is in the final year of her PhD program at the University of Amsterdam. She works with dr. Nathalie Degenaar, associate professor and research group leader at the API, on X-ray, UV, optical and radio observations of accreting neutron stars; cosmic cannibals that steal gas from a nearby companion star. Using major ground-based telescopes (e.g., the Very Large Telescope in Chile) and space missions (e.g., the Hubble Space Telescope) Fijma studies how this type of neutron stars are formed and evolve over their lifetime. By applying original data analysis approaches in her PhD research, she made the unexpected discovery that these neutron stars can blow dense winds into their surroundings. For her ESO fellowship she designed an ambitious observational program to follow up on this discovery to test her hypothesis that this behavior is common and to understand its wide astrophysical impact. Fijma will defend her PhD thesis on September 26, 2025, and start her position at ESO in November 2025.

About the fellowship: The ESO Fellowship Programme is one of the most recognised post-doctoral research programmes in the world. Annually only 5-6 fellowships are awarded to join ESO Garching. The official announcement of the 2025 ESO fellows can be found here.