Victoria Kaspi

Victoria Michelle Kaspi (born June 30, 1967) is a Canadian astrophysicist and a professor at McGill University. Her research primarily concerns neutron stars and pulsars.

Early life and education Kaspi was born in Austin, Texas, but her family moved to Canada when she was seven years old. and in 2006 she was named the Lorne Trottier Professor of Astrophysics. She is also a Fellow in the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research

In 2015, Kaspi founded the McGill Space Institute and serves as its director. She has also served as director of the Gravity and the Extreme Universe program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research since 2017, and holds the title of Distinguished James McGill Professor.

Kaspi's observations of the pulsar associated with supernova remnant G11.2–0.3 in the constellation Sagittarius, using the Chandra X-ray Observatory, showed that the pulsar was at the precise center of the supernova, which had been observed in 386 CE by the Chinese. This pulsar was only the second known pulsar to be associated with a supernova remnant, the first being the one in the Crab Nebula, and her studies greatly strengthened the conjectured relationship between pulsars and supernovae. Additionally, this observation cast into doubt previous methods of dating pulsars by their spin rate; these methods gave the pulsar an age that was 12 times too high to match the supernova.

Kaspi's research with the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer showed that soft gamma repeaters, astronomical sources of irregular gamma ray bursts, and anomalous X-ray pulsars, slowly rotating pulsars with high magnetic fields, could both be explained as magnetars.

She also helped discover the pulsar with the fastest known rotation rate, PSR J1748-2446ad,

As part of her doctoral work with Joseph Taylor, Kaspi conducted high-precision timing of millisecond pulsars B1855+09 and B1937+21 using the Arecibo Observatory. This work produced the first upper limit on the energy density of a stochastic gravitational wave background using pulsar timing array techniques, constraining Ωgh2 < 6 × 10−8 at 95% confidence. This result established the methodology later adopted by collaborations such as NANOGrav, the European Pulsar Timing Array, and the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array.

In 2013, Kaspi's research group reported the first observation of an "anti-glitch"—a sudden spin-down event—in the magnetar 1E 2259+586, published in Nature. This was contrary to all previously observed pulsar glitches, which involve sudden spin-ups, and provided new constraints on the internal structure of neutron stars.

Kaspi is a lead scientist on the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) Fast Radio Burst (FRB) project. Under her leadership, the CHIME/FRB collaboration detected hundreds of FRBs, dramatically expanding the known population and enabling statistical studies of their properties. This work contributed to her recognition as one of Nature'''s 10 people who mattered in science in 2019.

Awards and honours

1989: Anne Molson Gold Medal in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, McGill University 1998: Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society 2004: Herzberg Medal of the Canadian Association of Physicists 2006: Steacie Prize 2007: Rutherford Memorial Medal of the Royal Society of Canada 2009: Prix Marie-Victorin, the highest scientific award of the province of Québec 2010: Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). 2010: Elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States 2010: Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) John C. Polanyi Award 2013: Peter G. Martin Award of Canadian Astronomical Society 2013: Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal 2014: Elected a Fellow of American Physical Society 2015: Elected member American Academy of Arts & Sciences 2015: Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Prize 2016: Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering, the first woman to receive this prize. 2016: Companion of the Order of Canada, Canada's second highest civilian honour. 2017: Fonds de recherche du Québec, Prix d’excellence 2019: Kaspi was recognized by Nature'' as one Nature's 10 for her work on discovering Fast Radio Bursts with the CHIME telescope. 2021: Bakerian Medal of the Royal Society 2021: Shaw Prize 2021: Lancelot M. Berkeley Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy, American Astronomical Society 2022: Albert Einstein World Award of Science

Personal life Kaspi is Jewish. Her husband, David Langleben, is a cardiologist at McGill and at the Sir Mortimer B. Davis Jewish General Hospital in Montreal.