Canadian Astronomical Society
2023 R.M. Petrie Prize Lecture: You-Hua Chu
CASCA is pleased to announce Dr. You-Hua Chu, Distinguished Research Fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA), as the 2023 R.M Petrie Prize Lecturer.
Dr. You-Hua Chu is an international leader in the studies of the interstellar medium, star formation and feedback, supernova progenitors and environments, and dusty disks around white dwarfs. She is an expert on both the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds, having extensively researched the whole diverse population of these galaxies throughout her career. She makes use of both multi-wavelength observations (radio, infrared, optical and X-ray) and modelling to address fundamental questions about the fate of stars, their interaction with the interstellar medium and the evolution of galaxies in the nearby Universe. Throughout her career, Dr. You-Hua Chu has demonstrated outstanding leadership in the astronomical community on multiple continents and was notably the first woman to serve as Director of ASIAA.
CASCA is honoured to have Dr. You-Hua Chu give the Petrie Prize lecture.
2021 R.M. Petrie Prize Lecture: Heino Falke
CASCA is pleased to announce Dr. Heino Falcke as the 2021 R.M Petrie Prize Lecturer. Dr. Falcke is a Professor of Astroparticle Physics and Radio Astronomy at the Institute for Mathematics, Astronomy, and Particle Physics of the Faculty of Science at Radboud University. For decades, he has been an international leader in the quest to use very-long baseline interferometry to image the shadow of a black hole. These efforts culminated in the stunning images of the supermassive black hole in M87 produced by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). Dr. Falcke is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2019 won the Breakthrough Prize for Fundamental Physics as part of the EHT collaboration.
2019 R.M. Petrie Prize Lecture: Gabriela Gonzalez
CASCA would like to recognize the scholarship of Dr. Gabriela Gonzalez.
Dr. Gonzalez is a professor of physics and astronomy at the Louisiana State University and has been a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) since 1997. Her group has been involved in noise-characterization and calibration of the LIGO detectors, as well as data analysis. Dr. Gonzalez was the spokesperson for the LSC from March 2011 until March 2017, and in that role oversaw the ground-breaking
discovery of the first gravitational wave source with Advanced LIGO. She is a fellow of the Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2017.
2017 R.M. Petrie Prize Lecture: Charles Beichman
The 2017 R. M. Petrie Prize is awarded to Dr. Charles Beichman for his incredible career contributions to the study of extrasolar planetary systems.
Dr. Beichman is currently the Executive Director of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech, which is the focus of exoplanet research at NASA. Dr. Beichman’s search for evidence of planetary systems is long-standing, dating back to the first detections of planetary systems with IRAS through the Spitzer Space Telescope and now looking forward to the James Webb Space Telescope. He has published many key papers on Kuiper Belt and Asteroid Belt analogs around other stars and has developed analysis tools that were essential to several breakthrough observational results.
For the past 10 years Dr. Beichman has been closely associated with and helped to formulate NASA’s program to search for planets around other stars, serving as Chair of the Science Working Group for the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) and authoring numerous articles and reports on TPF and the search for terrestrial and ultimately habitable planets. He is also involved in extensive outreach efforts that include appearances on several programs about space.
2015 R.M. Petrie Prize Lecture: Wendy Freedman
2013 R.M. Petrie Prize Lecture: Françoise Combes
Citation not currently available.