In the news

News & Press

Press coverage, media features, awards, and research milestones.

Results

New preprint: supernova yields from dwarf spheroidals

Feb 2026
Student-led work (Heiger et al.) constraining supernova yields and delay times from dwarf spheroidal galaxies. Read more →
Paper

A deep 3-D dust map of the southern Galactic plane

Oct 2025
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. Read more →
Paper

ChronoFlow: an AI model for the ages of stars

Jul 2025
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. Read at U of T News →
PressU of T News

First white dwarf–main-sequence binary candidates in open star clusters

Nov 2024
Co-author on the discovery (Grondin et al., ApJ), also picked up by Phys.org and SciTechDaily. Read at U of T Arts & Science →
PressU of T Arts & Science

A 5-D map of the Milky Way — AAS Nova featured image

Aug 2024
My lead-author work (Speagle et al. 2024) highlighted as an AAS Nova featured image. Read at AAS Nova →
PressAAS Nova

Students train AI for the Galaxy Zoo: Euclid citizen-science project

2024
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. Read at U of T Statistical Sciences →
PressU of T Statistical Sciences

The Radcliffe Wave is waving

Feb 2024
Co-author on the finding that the galaxy's largest gaseous structure oscillates (Konietzka et al., Nature). Widely covered — CfA, Phys.org, Universe Today, the Harvard Crimson. Read at Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian →
PressCenter for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

Connaught New Researcher Award

2024
Awarded by the University of Toronto in support of early-career research.
Award

DECaPS2: a survey of 3.3 billion objects in the Milky Way's plane

Jan 2023
Co-author on the DECaPS2 survey and catalogue (Saydjari et al.). Covered by NOIRLab, Space.com, PBS NewsHour, and Salon. Read at NSF NOIRLab →
PressNSF NOIRLab

2022 John Charles Polanyi Prize in Physics

Jan 2023
Recognized by the Government of Ontario for outstanding early-career research — "I'm honoured and humbled to receive the Polanyi Prize." Read at University of Toronto →
AwardUniversity of Toronto

The Local Bubble: the Sun sits in a 1,000-light-year void that forms stars

Jan 2022
Co-author on the Local Bubble result (Zucker et al., Nature). Covered by CfA, the Harvard Gazette, STScI, and the Smithsonian. Read at Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian →
PressCenter for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

Mapping the Milky Way: an interactive tool for 170 million stars

Jul 2021
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. Read at Dunlap Institute →
PressDunlap Institute

The Radcliffe Wave — the largest gaseous structure in the galaxy

Jan 2020
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. Read at Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian →
PressCenter for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

dynesty published in MNRAS

2020
The dynamic nested sampling package paper appeared in MNRAS; it is now cited 2,000+ times. Read more →
Software