Alice P. Curtin

PhD Candidate, McGill University, Department of Physics
Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar

I am a final year PhD Candidate at the Trottier Space Institute at McGill University working under Victoria Kaspi. My work largely focuses on the study of fast radio bursts, pulsars, and gamma-ray bursts. In addition to research, I am an avid science communicator. In October 2025, I will be starting a postdoctoral fellowship as one of the first Canadian SKA Scientists. You can read all about it here!

TLDR Research Interests: Fast radio bursts, Pulsars, Radio Telescopes, Magnetars, Gamma-ray bursts, Galactic magnetic field, Very Long Baseline Interferometry

Photo of Alice Curtin

Research

Fast radio bursts are short (~ms), bursts of radio emission originating from extragalactic origins. Think of all of the energy the sun produces over the course of three days. Fast radio bursts emit the same amount of energy in ~a ms! However, despite being discovered in 2007, the origins of fast radio bursts (FRBs) still remain largely unknown. I am largely interested in trying to uncover the progenitors of FRBs using the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) radio telescope in British Columbia. Over the last six years, I have led five distinct projects and contributed to 30+ additional works in this regard. Most recentely, I was selected to be CHIME/FRB's run coordinator, and I am really excited for all of the future science to come from this world-leading experiment.

Image credit: CHIME

Science Communication

I spend a lot of time communicating science to different audiences. I was a writer and committee member for AstroBites, a graduate-student led community which writes accessible astronomy bites, for 4+ years. You can checkout all of my pieces written for Astrobites here. I have also served as one of four outreach coordinators for the physics department at McGill for the last five years, having spent over 1000 hours brainstorming, coordinating, and facilitating outreach projects in the Montreal area. Something I am particularly proud of is an outreach program that I co-founded in 2021 called 'Science in Space: How to Telescope.' This program is a collaboration between McGill University and Dell Technologies in which middle school girls build telescopes in Minecraft over the course of 10 weeks. You can read more about Science in Space in this recent article .