Canadian Astronomical Society
2024 Dunlap Award: Roberto Abraham
CASCA is pleased to announce that Dr. Roberto Abraham and the Dragonfly team are the winners of the 2024 Dunlap Award.
This award recognises a decade of innovation and effort on the part of Dr. Abraham and the Dragonfly team, who have designed, constructed, and operated the Dragonfly Telephoto Array in New Mexico. The Dragonfly team has used this facility to produce ground-breaking science results in the low surface brightness universe, including the discovery of ultra-diffuse galaxies and galaxies displaying exceptionally low amounts of dark matter. The Dragonfly team is relatively small compared to other high impact astronomical projects and the close-knit, hands-on environment fostered within the team has propelled many exceptional young scientists into high-profile, international careers. Dr. Abraham received his PhD from Oxford University and, following postdoctoral research at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge University, and the Royal Greenwich Observatory, joined the faculty of the University of Toronto in 2000.
CASCA is exceptionally pleased to recognise the efforts of Dr. Abraham and the entire Dragonfly team with this award.
2022 Dunlap Award: JJ Kavelaars
CASCA is pleased to announce that Dr. JJ Kavelaars is the winner of the 2022 Dunlap Award. This award recognizes his leadership at the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre. Over the past five years in which Dr. Kavelaars has been head of the CADC, it has provided public access to its largest number of telescope archival datasets, expanded a key initiative to bring high-performance distributed cloud computing services to Canadian astronomers via the Canadian Advanced Network for Astronomical Research (CANFAR), and laid the groundwork for new archives and processing environments for the upcoming JWST, Vera C. Rubin Observatory, and the Square Kilometre Array. He received his PhD from Queen's University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at McMaster University. He is now a Senior Research Officer at NRC-Herzberg in Victoria as well as an adjunct professor at UVic, where in addition to leading the CADC, he continues to make groundbreaking discoveries in the Kuiper Belt using ground and space-based telescopes as well as being a part of the New Horizons Mission team.
2020 Dunlap Award: René Doyon
CASCA is pleased to announce Dr. René Doyon as the recipient of the 2020 Dunlap Award for Innovation in Astronomical Research Tools. Dr. Doyon obtained his PhD from Imperial College London. He is currently a Professor of Physics at the University of Montreal, the Director of the Institut de recherche sur les exoplanètes, and the Director of the Mont Mégantic Observatory. Among his many honours and awards are the 2009 NSERC John C. Polanyi Award, the 2009 CASCA Peter G. Martin Prize, the 2010 AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize, the 2011 Medal of Honour of the National Assembly of Quebec, and a 2018 Killam Research Fellowship. Dr. Doyon has a long track record of providing both the Canadian and the international astronomical communities with access to first-class research tools. These include instruments on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (SPectropolarimètre InfraROUge, SPIRou; Wide-field InfraRed Camera, WIRCam; Kilo-InfraRed imager, KIR), in Chile (Near-Infrared Planet Searcher, NIRPS, on the La Silla 3.6m; Gemini Planet Imager, GPI, on the Gemini 8m; Caméra PAnoramique Proche-InfraRouge, CPAPIR, on the CTIO 1.5m), and at the Observatoire du Mont Mégantic (MONtreal Infrared CAmera, MONICA; CPAPIR; Spectrographe Imageur de MONtreal, SIMON). Dr. Doyon also leads the flagship Canadian contribution to the James Webb Space Telescope, the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS).
2018 Dunlap Award: Kipp Cannon
CASCA is pleased to announce that the recipient of the 2018 Dunlap Award for Innovation in Astronomical Research Tools is Dr. Kipp Cannon, Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Tokyo.
After receiving his PhD in 2003 from the University of Alberta, Dr. Cannon went to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee from 2004 to 2007 to pursue postdoctoral work. He was then a senior postdoctoral research with the LIGO Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology from 2007 to 2010 and a Senior Research Associate at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) from 2010 to 2016. He is now an associate professor at the Research Center for the Early Universe on the Hongo campus of the University of Tokyo.
Dr. Cannon has made key contributions to data analysis techniques in the search for transients in astronomy that led directly to the discovery of GW170817, the first gravitational wave detected from a neutron star collision, and ultimately to SSS17a, the first optical counterpart associated with a gravitational-wave source. In particular, his work on the development of the GSTCAL pipeline over more than seven years has enabled these transformational discoveries to be made from LIGO observations. Much of the work leading to these discoveries was conducted while Dr. Cannon was at CITA.
2016 Dunlap Award: Peter Stetson
CASCA is pleased to announce Dr. Peter Stetson, from NRC-Herzberg, as the 2016 recipient of the Dunlap Award.
Dr. Stetson obtained his Ph.D. in Astronomy at Yale in 1979. After a short research fellowship at Yale he took a Carnegie Fellowship at the Mount Wilson and Las Campanas Observatories, subsequently moving to the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory (DAO) of NRC-Herzberg in 1983.
Dr. Stetson has been the principal research officer at DAO since 2003.
He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2006, and was awarded the George van Biesbroeck Prize of the American Astronomical Society in 2008.
To address the problem of measuring the properties of stars in digital images from the earliest CCDs, Dr. Stetson developed and released the DAOPHOT program in 1986. He has single-handedly maintained, improved, and supported it since then. Countless investigators have used DAOPHOT; the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project to measure the size of the Universe and the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of dark energy are but two transformational scientific results that exploit its photometry. Dr. Stetson’s more recent spectral line measurement code, DAOSPEC, has been adopted by many of the world’s largest optical facilities. Additionally, Dr. Stetson’s carefully calibrated, freely available photometric standard star catalog now exceeds 114,000 objects, and underpins the majority of photometric observations carried out today. Dr. Stetson has also long served as an image structure expert for senior National Research Council engineers, impacting the design of instruments for the next generation of large facilities such as the Thirty Meter Telescope.
CASCA congratulates Dr. Stetson on the receipt of the 2016 Dunlap Award.
2014 Dunlap Award: Matt Dobbs
The Dunlap Award for Innovation in Astronomical Research Tools is awarded biennially to an individual or team for the design, invention, or improvement of instrumentation or software that has enabled significant advances in astronomy. CASCA is pleased to announce Prof. Matt Dobbs, from McGill University, as the inaugural recipient of the Dunlap Award.
Prof. Dobbs received his Ph.D. in experimental Particle Physics from the University of Victoria in 2002. Following an Owen Chamberlain Fellowship at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, he moved to McGill University where he is presently an associate professor in the Department of Physics and an associate member of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. A Canada Research Chair, Prof. Dobbs was awarded a Sloan Fellowship in 2009.
An internationally recognized figure in experimental cosmology instrumentation, Prof. Dobbs is a leader in the design and implementation of systems using Superconducting Transition-Edge Sensor (TES) bolometers. Because TES bolometers can be fabricated lithographically in large arrays, they have allowed a leap forward in experimental sensitivity for CMB experiments. Prof. Dobbs’ design and end-to-end implementation of multiplexed TES readout systems for the South Pole Telescope, PolarBEAR, EBEX and other telescopes have contributed directly to groundbreaking advances in CMB research, including galaxy cluster surveys with the Sunyaev Zel’dovich effect and ultra-deep measurements of CMB polarization.