Title: From the City to the Stars: Looking at stars from the inside out and a city kid’s path to studying matter at extreme states

From a very young age, I was always fascinated with stars. This fascination led me to plasma physics (key component to understanding stars). As a result, much of my scientific career has been rooted in understanding plasmas approaching stellar interior conditions. In particular, transport properties of plasmas at or near the conditions that exists in stellar interiors.

With an introduction that explains my personal journey, I will present experimental studies of transport properties of non-burning plasmas with kinetic conditions comparable to stellar interiors. While much of the emphasis is on understanding opacity and atomic bound states of matter under extreme conditions, experiments on thermal conductivity and electron-ion equilibration will suggested as well.