Daryl Haggard

Daryl Haggard is an American-Canadian astronomer and associate professor in the Department of Physics at McGill University and the McGill Space Institute.

Early life and education Haggard was born in Seattle, Washington, the fifth of eight children, and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico at 6 months of age. Haggard's father was a mathematician and college professor. Her mother trained as biologist and owns a native plant nursery in Santa Fe.

She studied at St. John's College, earning a bachelor's degree in philosophy and mathematics in May 1995. She became fascinated by orbital mechanics after reading Newton's Principia and realizing that mathematical equations could describe the orbits of planets.

Career After completing her Ph.D., Haggard accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) at Northwestern University, Illinois. She spent one year as an assistant professor of astronomy in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Amherst College, Massachusetts, before accepting an assistant professorship at McGill University in Montreal and joining the newly formed McGill Space Institute in 2015.

Daryl Haggard's research group uses radio, submillimeter, near infrared, and X-ray telescopes to study compact objects, including active galactic nuclei, Sagittarius A* (the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy) and the mergers of neutron stars.

In 2017, she led a team that used the Chandra X-ray Observatory to detect the afterglow of the merger of two neutron stars, GW170817, the first detection of X-rays from a gravitational wave source. Follow-up observations of the merger remnant by Haggard's group in 2017 showed the remnant grew brighter, rather than dimming, as expected. The remnant finally began to fade in X-ray observations taken in 2018, 260 days after the merger.

She is currently a member of the Canadian Joint Committee on Space Astronomy, the Event Horizon Telescope Multiwavelength Coordination Team and the Thirty Meter Telescope International Science Development Team.

CIERA Postdoctoral Fellow (2010–2014)

Personal life Haggard resides in Montreal with her husband Nicolas Benjamin Cowan, an astronomer and planetary scientist. They have one son.

Selected publications