Ingrid Stairs

Ingrid Stairs is a Canadian astronomer at the University of British Columbia. She studies pulsars and their companions as a way to study binary pulsar evolution, pulsar instrumentation and polarimetry, and Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). She was awarded the 2017 Rutherford Memorial Medal for physics of the Royal Society of Canada, and was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2018.

Education Stairs earned her undergraduate Honors degree from McGill University in 1993, and her Masters and PhD degrees from Princeton University in 1995 and 1998, respectively. For her PhD research, she worked with Professor Joe Taylor.

Career From 1998 to 2000, Stairs was a postdoctoral fellow at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in the United Kingdom. From 2000 to 2002, she was a research associate at NRAO in Green Bank, West Virginia. She became an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia in 2002, an associate professor in 2007, and a full professor in 2012.

In addition to finding pulsars, she uses long term pulsar timing to study the orbital dynamics of pulsar systems, such as and interaction between the two stars in the system. She has extensively studied relativistic binary systems like B1534+12, J1906+0746, and the double pulsar J0737-3039A/B. She also tracks some young pulsars, such as J1740-3502, which has a massive binary companion, and PSR 1828-11, which undergoes correlated timing and magnetospheric changes.

Stairs is part of the CHIME FRB and pulsar collaborations. CHIME is currently operational and has released many new FRB candidates, including new repeating FRB candidates. Stairs was responsible for managing the installation of the CHIME pulsar instrument.

Honours and awards 2018 American Physical Society Fellow 2017 Canadian Astronomical Society Peter G. Martin award for Mid-career Achievement 2014 Senior Fellow, CIFAR Cosmology & Gravity/Gravity & Extreme Universe programs 2010-2013 NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement 2002-2007 NSERC University Faculty Award 2000-2002 Jansky Research Associateship, NRAO 1998-2000 NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship 1993-1997 NSERC 1967 Scholarship 1993 Joseph Henry Award, Princeton University