Radosław Smolec

Radosław Smolec's photo

Degree: Ph.D.

Position: Associate Professor

Functions: Head Of The Phd Studies


Division: Astrophysics II (Warsaw)

ORCID: 0000-0001-7217-4884

Office: 118

Phone: +48 223296118

Personal website: https://users.camk.edu.pl/smolec/


E-mail: smolec@camk.edu.pl

Radoslaw Smolec is an institute professor at the  Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center (CAMK) in Warsaw. He is the head of the GeoPlanet doctoral school created by 7 institutes of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Polish Geological Institute. He serves as coordinator of the school at CAMK and as head of the Ph.D. program at CAMK, which is being extinguished.


He defended his doctoral dissertation Nonlinear Modeling of Radial Stellar Pulsation at CAMK in 2009. He held post-doctoral positions in Institute of Astronomy, University of Vienna (2009-2011) and in Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center (20012-2014). Habilitation degree was awarded in 2016.


Prof. Smolec is one of the developers of the Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA) - an open, publicly available software whose main module is the stellar evolution code. The Radial Stellar Pulsation (RSP) module is based on nonlinear pulsation codes written by Prof. Smolec during his doctoral studies. Prof. Smolec is also a member of the Araucaria, project, a member of the Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium (KASC), TESS Asteroseismic Science Consortium (TASC), and BRITE Executive Science Team.


According to the NASA ADS database (as of August 21, 2022), he has authored more than 120 indexed articles that have been cited more than 3,000 times. A link to his publications included in NASA ADS can be found here.

Prof. Smolec is the head of a research group consisting of dr. Vincenta Hocde and PhD students: Rajeeva Singh Rathour and Oliwia Ziółkowska.


Research interests

  • nonlinear modelling of stellar pulsation (Cepheids and RR Lyrae stars),
  • astroseismology,
  • stellar evolution.

Grants / Scientific Projects

Prof. Smolec has also managed the below projects:

Awards / Honors

  • Scholarship of the Minister of Science and Higher Education for outstanding young researchers (2015-2018).

Related websites



Prof. Smolec spends his free moments photographing butterflies - he has already documented more than half of the species of Polish diurnal butterflies. Link to photo gallery: