Laurie Rousseau-Nepton

Laurie Rousseau-Nepton is a Canadian astronomer at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, and was the first Indigenous woman in Canada to obtain a Ph.D. in astrophysics.

Early life and education

Rousseau-Nepton is an Innu woman whose family are from the Mashteuiatsh reserve in the Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean region of Quebec. Her mother was a civil engineering technician and her father was a civil engineer. Her interest in science was sparked as a child when she went on a hunting trip with her father to the Ashuapmushuan Wildlife Reserve in Quebec. During the day, she became attentive to details, observing small changes in the environment to be a better hunter. At night, she was able to observe changes in the night sky such as shooting stars and the aurora borealis.

During her studies in Cégep, she was attracted by physics because it was both challenging and offered freedom in methods of problem solving. Her doctoral research involved studying the HII regions of nearby spiral galaxies, using the SpIOMM, an imaging Fourier transform spectrometer developed at University of Laval for the Mont-Mégantic Observatory.

Career After completing her PhD, Rousseau-Nepton took up an appointment as an postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo. From 2017 to 2023, she was a resident astronomer at the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope. Rousseau-Nepton is the Principal Investigator for SIGNALS, a large survey program aiming at observing over 50,000 resolved star-forming regions in nearby galaxies. In September 2023, she became an assistant professor at the University of Toronto.

Rousseau-Nepton began researching Innu oral traditions about astronomy after she was asked speak about the perspective on eclipses among First Nations by a colleague. In interviews, she has drawn a connection between her work on star formation and the lifecycle of stars and the Innu tradition that people come from the stars, and will return to the sky after our time on Earth.

Honors and awards Awards won include:

Qilak Award from the Canadian Astronomical Society, 2023 Post-Doctoral Fellow, Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Nature et Technologies (FRQNT), 2017-2019 Pierre Amiot - Award for the best scientific talk, Université Laval, 2014 Hubert Reeves Fellowship, Fonds Hubert Reeves, 2010 Fellowship for native woman in science, Association des femmes diplômées des universités du Québec (AFDU) 2010