Events

Jennifer Chan is a postdoctoral fellow at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) and the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, supported by joint CITA and University of Toronto Faculty of Arts & Science fellowships. She earned her Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Astrophysics from University College London, and a Bachelor's in Physics from the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on investigating the origins, evolution, and properties of large-scale magnetic fields in the Universe, essential for understanding their impact on cosmic structures.

Ralph Pudritz is a theoretical astrophysicist at McMaster University, whose research focuses on star and planet formation, and origins of life. Ralph is the founding (2004-2015) Director of McMaster's Origins Institute (OI).

Matías Bravo is a Herschel Fellow at McMaster University. His research explores the formation and evolution of galaxies at a population level through a combination of state-of-the-art semi-analytic models and large-scale spectroscopic galaxy surveys, with a special focus on the physical mechanisms regulating star formation at a galaxy scale like environmental processes and AGN feedback. .

Hailing from Algeria, I have a background in High Energy Physics,  in which I hold Master's from Sorbonne University in Paris. I spent four years at the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics where I did my PhD, 
working with James Taylor, on trying to leverage Galaxy Cluster structural properties for Cosmology. I am now an Analyst in Economics and Investment Research at the Alberta Investment Management Corporation 
(AIMCo).

Hannah Dykaar is currently a PhD student at the Dunlap Institute and the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, where she works with Professors Maria Drout and Bryan Gaensler. Her research focuses on tidal disruption events (TDEs), which occur when stars get sufficiently close to supermassive black holes and are torn apart.

Naadiyah Jagga is a Ph.D. candidate in Astronomy at York University. She did her undergraduate and master's degrees at Leiden Observatory. She is interested in the evolution of galaxies, with focus on the stellar mass of galaxies. Her research, under supervision of Dr. Adam Muzzin, involves creating and analysing spatially resolved maps of galaxies observed by JWST.  She is a member of the Canadian NIRISS Unbiased Cluster Survey (CANUCS) program, the JWST Ultradeep Nirspec and NIRCam ObserVations before the Epoch of Reionization (UNCOVER) program and co-PI of the JWST Ultimate Medium-band Photometric Survey (JUMPS) program.

Eduardo Martín-Martínez is a Full Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo. He is also an Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) Associate, a Perimeter Institute Affiliate and a member of the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics. Since July 2022, he has served as the Chair of the International Society for Relativistic Quantum Information.

Steffani Grondin is a final-year PhD candidate in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the evolution of compact object binaries and the common envelope phase, using star clusters as laboratories to study binary evolution. Steffani is also the main developer of Corespray, a Python package that efficiently simulates dynamical interactions in star clusters. Her software has provided new insights into a variety of Milky Way science cases, including hypervelocity stars, stellar streams and the composition of the Galactic halo.

Tobias Geron finished his PhD in Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, UK, and he recently started as a Rubin fellow at the University of Toronto. Tobias spends his time between studying bars in galaxies and developing software to study transients with the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory. 

Veronika Dornan is a final-year PhD candidate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at McMaster University. Her research uses observations of galaxies' globular star cluster systems as tracers of their evolutionary histories. She is particularly interested in studying the globular cluster system mass - halo mass scaling relation and understanding what drives this relation from dwarf galaxies to massive ellipticals galaxies.