Astrophysicist Kaspi wins top award
McGill University astrophysicist Vicky Kaspi has become the first woman to win Canada’s top award for science and engineering — a prize that recognizes the excellence and influence of her research contributions.
You could say Kaspi has boldly gone where no woman has gone before.
Kaspi, 48, is the recipient of this year’s Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering, the highest honour bestowed by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), which includes a grant of up to $1 million distributed over five years.
She is not just the first woman but also one of the youngest researchers to ever win the prestigious prize.
Fascinated throughout her career with the rapidly spinning compact neutron stars called pulsars, Kaspi has been particularly fired up recently by the quest to understand the origin of the mysterious phenomenon known as fast radio bursts.
In 2014, an extraordinarily bright radio burst that was detected by her team generated much excitement in the scientific community. In 2008, her research group made news around the world by confirming a prediction of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
From Ottawa on Tuesday, where she was to receive the award, Kaspi said it was “a tremendous honour” and that she was blessed to have a job she loves.
“An honour like this is the icing on the cake,” she said.
Kaspi, who is also the director of the McGill Space Institute, said the funds will be used to train the next generation of scientists in state-ofthe-art astrophysics research.
“The award is significant and will be extremely useful for exciting astrophysics research that my colleagues and students are working on, specifically on a new Canadian radio telescope, CHIME,” she said. CHIME is a novel radio telescope that will measure over half the sky each day as the Earth turns.
She is one of the world’s leading experts in pulsars, which involves studying the ancient remnants of the most massive stars in the Milky Way. She is also a leading authority of magnetars, which have shed light on how stars evolve and how they die in the supernova explosions that produce pulsars.
In addition to holding a Canada Research Chair and the Lorne Trottier Chair in Astrophysics and Cosmology at McGill, Kaspi has many career awards including the 2015 Canada Council Killam Prize, the Rutherford Medal from the Royal Society of Canada, the U.S. Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy and Quebec’s highest honour for scientists, the Prix Marie-Victorin.
NSERC also announced that Elena Bennett, a professor in McGill’s department of Natural Resources and School of Environment, is the recipient of an E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship, a $250,000 fellowship to enhance the career development of outstanding scientists and engineers.
As well, doctoral candidate Yasser Gidi, working in the chemical imaging lab of Gonzalo Cosa in McGill’s chemistry department, has won NSERC’s Gilles Brassard Doctoral Prize for Interdisciplinary Research.
“McGill is grateful to NSERC for recognizing three of our exceptional researchers with these prestigious awards,” said McGill principal Suzanne Fortier in a statement.