CASCA 2026 Student Award Winners

June 13, 2026

The Board and Graduate Student committee of the Canadian Astronomical Society / Société Canadienne D’Astronomie (CASCA) is happy to recognise the several students, in no particular order, for exceptional research contributions during the 2026 CASCA Science Meeting at Université de Montréal.

Best Oral Presentations:

Board:

Sarah Silverman (McGill University) — The Fate of Ice Sheets on Chaotically Rotating Exoplanets

Kaitlyn Hessel (University of Victoria) — Advancing Coherent Differential Imaging: Laboratory Gains and First On-Sky Results with the SPIDERS Self-Coherent Camera

Olivia Pereira (Université de Montréal) — New Infrared BPT Diagnostics for JWST: Probing Warm Gas in Massive Galaxies

Graduate Student Committee:

Thomas Vandal (Université de Montréal) — Constraining the multiplicity of the coldest brown dwarfs down to planetary masses between 0.5 and 1000 au with JWST

Diego Martinez Noriega (University of Waterloo) & Isabelle Laing (University of Toronto) — DOROTHY: Stellar Catalogue for 13 Million Milky Way Stars Derived Using a Machine Learning Pipeline

Best Poster Presentations:

Board:

James Smith (Western University) — Determining Variability in High Velocity Quasar Outflows Using SimBAL

Dev Khullar (University of Lethbridge) — Hunting Down Fugitives: Observational Constraints on the Cluster Ejection Mechanisms of X-ray Binaries in Spiral Galaxies

Theodore Grosson (University of Victoria) — Exploring the trade-space of distributed aperture telescopes in spectroscopy

Graduate Students Committee:

Mayukh Bagchi (Queen’s University) — The Balloon-borne VLBI Experiment: Instrument Overview and Upgrades

Alexandra Rochon (McMaster University) — Understanding the Impact of Cold Gas Giants on the Formation of Super-Earths and Sub-Neptunes with Astrometry

We are grateful for the support for these student prizes generously provided by Fonds de recherche du Québec, The Trottier Space Institute, The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Fédération des astronomes amateurs du Québec, and Club d’Astronomie Mont-Tremblant.