In the news

News & Press

Press coverage, new papers, awards, and news from the group.

Results

Aug 2026 · Group

Mairead Heiger completes her PhD, joins UVA as a joint GECO/CosmicAI postdoctoral fellow

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.

Jul 2026 · Group

Simran Nerval and Mairead Heiger win the Fieldus Award

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. Read at U of T Astronomy & Astrophysics →
U of T Astronomy & Astrophysics

Feb 2026 · Paper

New preprint: supernova yields from dwarf spheroidals

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

Oct 2025 · Paper

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

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 →

Sep 2025 · Group

Steffani Grondin and Michael Poon win the 2025 Jui Lin (Allen) Yen Award

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. Read at U of T Astronomy & Astrophysics →
U of T Astronomy & Astrophysics

Jul 2025 · Press

ChronoFlow: an AI model for the ages of stars

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 →
U of T News

Nov 2024 · Press

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

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

Sep 2024 · Group

Sam Berek and Shivan Khullar win the Jui Lin (Allen) Yen Award

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. Read at U of T Astronomy & Astrophysics →
U of T Astronomy & Astrophysics

Aug 2024 · Press

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

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

2024 · Press

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

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 →
U of T Statistical Sciences

2024 · Award

Connaught New Researcher Award

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

Jan 2023 · Press

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

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

Jan 2023 · Award

2022 John Charles Polanyi Prize in Physics

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 →
University of Toronto

Jan 2022 · Press

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

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 →
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

Jul 2021 · Press

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

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 →
Dunlap Institute

Jan 2020 · Press

The Radcliffe Wave — the largest gaseous structure in the galaxy

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 →
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

2020 · Software

dynesty published in MNRAS

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