https://joshspeagle.com/news.html News and press from Joshua S. Speagle, astrostatistics at the University of Toronto. en-us 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://joshspeagle.com/news.html tag:joshspeagle.com,2026-08-01:news/mairead-heiger-completes-her-phd-joins-uva-as-a-joint-geco-c 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Group Mairead successfully defended her PhD in Astronomy & Astrophysics and is moving on to a joint postdoctoral fellowship with GECO and CosmicAI at the University of Virginia. https://www.astro.utoronto.ca/2026-fieldus-award-recipients-simran-nerval-and-mairead-heiger/ tag:joshspeagle.com,2026-07-01:news/simran-nerval-and-mairead-heiger-win-the-fieldus-award 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Group Departmental recognition for a very high level of research acumen and service. Mairead was honored for her spectroscopic follow-up of the ultra-faint dwarf galaxies Eridanus IV and Centaurus I, her DLEIY galactic chemical evolution framework, and her service as GASA co-chair. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2026arXiv260222333H tag:joshspeagle.com,2026-02-01:news/new-preprint-supernova-yields-from-dwarf-spheroidals 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Paper Student-led work (Heiger et al.) constraining supernova yields and delay times from dwarf spheroidal galaxies. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025ApJ...992...39Z tag:joshspeagle.com,2025-10-01:news/a-deep-3-d-dust-map-of-the-southern-galactic-plane 01 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Paper Co-led a high-angular-resolution 3-D dust map of the southern Milky Way (Zucker, Saydjari & Speagle, ApJ), built on the DECaPS2 survey with the brutus inference framework. https://www.astro.utoronto.ca/sam-berek-and-shivan-khullar-win-the-jui-lin-allen-yen-award-2/ tag:joshspeagle.com,2025-09-01:news/steffani-grondin-and-michael-poon-win-the-2025-jui-lin-allen 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Group Departmental recognition for exceptional achievement in research by a graduate student. Steffani completed her PhD studying massive star clusters, including post-common-envelope binaries and dynamical interactions. https://samberek.github.io/samberek/index.html tag:joshspeagle.com,2025-08-01:news/sam-berek-completes-her-phd-joins-umass-amherst-as-an-nsf-po 01 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Group Sam successfully defended her PhD in the David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics and is now an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at UMass Amherst. https://www.utoronto.ca/news/u-t-astronomers-develop-ai-model-determine-stars-ages tag:joshspeagle.com,2025-07-01:news/chronoflow-an-ai-model-for-the-ages-of-stars 01 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Press Student-led work (Van-Lane et al.) using normalizing flows for gyrochronology, co-supervised with Gwen Eadie. Covered by U of T News and Phys.org. https://www.artsci.utoronto.ca/news/u-t-astronomers-discover-first-white-dwarf-main-sequence-binary-candidates-open-star-clusters tag:joshspeagle.com,2024-11-01:news/first-white-dwarf-main-sequence-binary-candidates-in-open-st 01 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Press Co-author on the discovery (Grondin et al., ApJ), also picked up by Phys.org and SciTechDaily. https://www.astro.utoronto.ca/sam-berek-and-shivan-khullar-win-the-jui-lin-allen-yen-award/ tag:joshspeagle.com,2024-09-01:news/sam-berek-and-shivan-khullar-win-the-jui-lin-allen-yen-award 01 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Group Sam was honored for "Should Zeros Count? Modeling the Galaxy–Globular Cluster Scaling Relation with(out) Zero-inflated Count Models," introducing zero-inflated count models to astronomy and showing that a negative binomial model fits observed globular cluster counts better than a Poisson model. https://aasnova.org/2024/08/12/featured-image-a-5d-map-of-the-milky-way/ tag:joshspeagle.com,2024-08-01:news/a-5-d-map-of-the-milky-way-aas-nova-featured-image 01 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Press My lead-author work (Speagle et al. 2024) highlighted as an AAS Nova featured image. https://www.statistics.utoronto.ca/news/exploring-universe-u-t-students%E2%80%99-journey-galaxy-zoo-project tag:joshspeagle.com,2024-01-01:news/students-train-ai-for-the-galaxy-zoo-euclid-citizen-science- 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Press U of T Statistical Sciences profiled undergraduates Khalid Edris and Junbo Li — co-mentored with Dunlap Fellow Mike Walmsley — on training the Zoobot AI to classify galaxies from the Euclid space telescope. https://joshspeagle.com/news.html tag:joshspeagle.com,2024-01-01:news/connaught-new-researcher-award 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Award Awarded by the University of Toronto in support of early-career research. https://noirlab.edu/public/news/noirlab2301/ tag:joshspeagle.com,2023-01-01:news/decaps2-a-survey-of-3-3-billion-objects-in-the-milky-way-s-p 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Press Co-author on the DECaPS2 survey and catalogue (Saydjari et al.). Covered by NOIRLab, Space.com, PBS NewsHour, and Salon. https://www.utoronto.ca/celebrates/joshua-speagle-wins-2022-john-charles-polanyi-prize-physics tag:joshspeagle.com,2023-01-01:news/2022-john-charles-polanyi-prize-in-physics 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Award Recognized by the Government of Ontario for outstanding early-career research — "I'm honoured and humbled to receive the Polanyi Prize." https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/1000-light-year-wide-bubble-surrounding-earth-source-all-nearby-young-stars tag:joshspeagle.com,2022-01-01:news/the-local-bubble-the-sun-sits-in-a-1-000-light-year-void-tha 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Press Co-author on the Local Bubble result (Zucker et al., Nature). Covered by CfA, the Harvard Gazette, STScI, and the Smithsonian. https://www.dunlap.utoronto.ca/dunlap-postdoc-creates-interactive-map-of-the-milky-way/ tag:joshspeagle.com,2021-07-01:news/mapping-the-milky-way-an-interactive-tool-for-170-million-st 01 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000 Press Profiled by the Dunlap Institute for building the first interactive map of the Milky Way's stars and dust — the basis of the allsky visualization. https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/radcliffe-wave tag:joshspeagle.com,2020-01-01:news/the-radcliffe-wave-the-largest-gaseous-structure-in-the-gala 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000 Press Co-author on the discovery of a 9,000-light-year wave of stellar nurseries near the Sun (Alves et al., Nature). Featured by CfA and the Harvard Gazette. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staa278 tag:joshspeagle.com,2020-01-01:news/dynesty-published-in-mnras 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000 Software The dynamic nested sampling package paper appeared in MNRAS; it is now cited 2,000+ times.