Media Invited to Canadian Astronomy Conference in Winnipeg
The University of Manitoba will proudly host the 2016 CASCA (Canadian Astronomical Society / Société Canadienne d’Astronomie) conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Join them from 30 May to 2 June 2016 as they celebrate Canadian astronomical and astrophysical research (http://astro.physics.umanitoba.ca/casca2016).
The conference will be held in the Fort Garry Hotel, 222 Broadway, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3C 0R3 Canada, +1 204-942-8251 (http://www.fortgarryhotel.com).
The opening reception will take place on Monday, 30 May, from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm CDT in the Broadway Room on the main floor.
Plenary and special talks will be in the Provencher Ballroom on the main floor. Parallel sessions will be located in the Provencher Ballroom and in the Gateway and LaVerendrye rooms on the mezzanine level (http://www.fortgarryhotel.com/public_docs/the-fort-garry-hotel/floorplans/FG-Mezzanine-FP.pdf).
Opening remarks are in the Ballroom on Tuesday, 31 May, at 9:00 am CDT.
The public lecture will be given by Dr. Art McDonald of Queen’s University, a recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics. It will take place from 7:30 to 9:00 pm CDT on Wednesday, 1 June, in Eckhardt Gramatté Hall on the third floor of Centennial Hall at 515 Portage Ave. (http://uwinnipeg.ca/event-services/venue-options/eg-hall.html).
Accredited journalists are invited to register free of charge by emailing cascapressofficer@gmail.com.
Contacts:
Leslie Sage
CASCA Press Officer
+1 301-675-8957
cascapressofficer@gmail.com
Chris Rutkowski
Media Relations, University of Manitoba
+1 204-474-9514
rutkowsk@cc.umanitoba.ca
Some highlights of the meeting follow. All talks are embargoed until given. All times are Central Daylight Time = UTC — 5 hours.
Dr. Chris Pritchet of the University of Victoria will be given the Carl S. Beals Award on Tuesday, 31 May, at 9:15 am.
The Carlyle S. Beals Award was established by CASCA in 1981 in recognition of the groundbreaking research of the late C. S. Beals. The Beals Prize was originally awarded to provide a grant for travel to a General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (every three years). In 1988, however, it was first awarded in its present form: to a Canadian astronomer or an astronomer working in Canada, in recognition of outstanding achievement in research (either as a specific achievement or as a lifetime of research).
Dr. Pritchet obtained his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Toronto in 1975. After holding positions at the University of British Columbia, the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory and the University of Calgary, Dr. Pritchet has been on faculty in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Victoria since 1982. He was Department Chair from 1995 to 1998, and the chair of the 2010-2020 Long Range Plan Committee for Canadian Astronomy. Dr. Pritchet is currently an associate fellow of the CIfAR Cosmology and Gravity program as well as the principal investigator of CANFAR, which coordinates astronomical computing resources across Canada.
Dr. Pritchet’s research in observational cosmology combines the best available technology with sophisticated analysis techniques. His discovery, along with Sidney van den Bergh, of RR Lyrae variable stars in the Andromeda galaxy is recognized as a vital contribution to fixing distance scales in the Local Group. He is a leader of the Supernova Legacy Survey that has provided precise measurements of dark matter and dark energy in the universe, and he initiated the close galaxy pair study in the Canadian Network for Observational Cosmology redshift survey. He has also produced important results on galaxy mass profiles, globular cluster distributions, and stellar populations of galaxies in the local universe. Dr. Pritchet has mentored over three dozen graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and has also made important contributions to astronomy education and outreach as a Galileo lecturer of the International Year of Astronomy and the initiator and primary organizer of Victoria’s Café Scientifique.
Dr. Peter Stetson of the National Research Council Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics will be given the Dunlap Award on Tuesday, 31 May, at 4:30 pm.
The Dunlap Award was established in 2013 thanks to a generous gift from the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Toronto. The award is to be presented in even-numbered years, to an individual or team for the design, invention, or improvement of instrumentation or software that has enabled significant advances in astronomy.
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 distance scale 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.
Dr. Jaymie Matthews of the University of British Columbia will receive the Qilak Award on Wednesday, 1 June, at 12:00 pm.
The Qilak Award recognizes individual Canadian residents, or teams of residents, who have made an outstanding contribution either to the public understanding and appreciation of astronomy in Canada or to informal astronomy education in Canada.
After obtaining his Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario in 1987, Dr. Matthews held positions at Western and l’Université de Montréal before moving to the University of British Columbia as a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in 1988. He obtained tenure at UBC in 2000 and has been a full professor there since 2008.
Dr. Matthews’s dedication and boundless enthusiasm for communicating with the public about astronomy are illustrated by the dozens of outreach activities in which he participates annually, ranging from public presentations, to radio interviews, to campus tours, to TV show consultations. Beyond his legendary teaching reputation at UBC, he has given courses aimed at younger children as well as special lectures in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the First Nations Summer Science Program, and the Canadian Association of Physics (CAP) undergraduate lecture series, among many others. In recognition of these efforts, Dr. Matthews received the CAP Education Medal in 2002, was named an officer of the Order of Canada in 2006, and received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012.
Dr. Jonathan Gagné of the Carnegie Institution of Science’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) will receive the Plaskett Medal on Thursday, 2 June, at 09:30 am.
The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada and the Canadian Astronomical Society created the Plaskett Medal in recognition of the pivotal role played by John Stanley Plaskett in the establishment of astrophysical research in Canada. The award, consisting of a gold medal, is made annually to the Ph.D. graduate from a Canadian university who is judged to have submitted the most outstanding doctoral thesis in astronomy or astrophysics in the preceding two calendar years.
Dr. Gagné completed his doctoral studies at l’Université de Montréal under the supervision of Dr. David Lafrenière and Dr. René Doyon. His thesis, entitled “La recherche de naines brunes et étoiles de faible masse dans les associations cinématiques jeunes du voisinage solaire,” identifies and characterizes new substellar mass objects that belong to nearby young associations of stars. Dr. Gagné developed a powerful new algorithm to select highly probable substellar objects in young associations that is now widely used by the community. He also carried out an all-sky survey to identify, follow up, and characterize actual candidates, more than doubling the number of confirmed brown dwarfs. Dr. Gagné is now widely recognized as a leading figure in the study of nearby young substellar objects.
Dr. Gagné is currently a Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution for Science, where he will work to identify and characterize young brown dwarfs with only a few times the mass of Jupiter.
Invited speakers:
Tony Moffat (Universite de Montreal): the BRITE-Constellation nanosatellite mission, Tuesday, 31 May, at 10:45 am
Heidi Hammel (Associated Universities for Research in Astronomy): catastrophic collisions in the solar system, Tuesday, 31 May, at 10:45 am.
Rob Petre (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center): expanding the horizons of X-ray astronomy, Tuesday, 31 May, at 2 pm
Tim Robishaw (National Research Council of Canada): probing extragalactic magnetic fields, Wednesday, 1 June, at 9 am.
Manuela Campanelli (Rochester Institute of Technology): simulations of binary black hole mergers, Wednesday, 1 June, at 2:30 pm.
Art McDonald (Queen’s University): teachers’ workshop, Wednesday, 1 June, at 3 pm.
Grant Tremblay (Yale University): galaxy scale fountains of gas, Thursday, 2 June, at 2 pm.
Judith Irwin (Queen’s University): disk-halo dynamics, Thursday, 2 June, at 2 pm.
The following contributed talks may be of interest:
Jennifer West, Tuesday 31 May, 12 pm in the session Galactic I
Lorne Nelson, Tuesday, 31 May, 3:15 pm in the session High Energy Astrophysics
Helen Kirk, Tuesday, 31 May, 2:15 pm in the session Galactic II
Gwendolyn Eadie, Tuesday, 31 May, 3:15 pm in the session Cosmology I
Mary Beth Laychak, Wednesday, 1 June, 9:15 am in the session Education
Diana Dragomir, Wednesday, 1 June, 3:15 pm in the session Planets II
Henry Ngo, Wednesday, 1 June, 3:30 pm in the session Planets II
Chris O’Dea, Thursday, 2 June at 4:15 pm in the session Extragalactic II
David Schade, Thursday, 2 June at 4:15 pm in the session Big Projects/Missions
