Alice Prashker Curtin, PhD

I received my PhD from McGill University as a Vanier Canada Graduate Fellow working on fast radio bursts (FRBs) under Prof. Victoria Kaspi. My PhD was titled "Probing the Origins of FRBs using CHIME: High-energy Counterpart Searches and Burst Morphology." It focused on using a radio telescope located in British Columbia, CHIME, to understand the origins of FRBs. In particular, I focused on searching for FRBs associated with gamma-ray bursts, as well as the time and frequency structure of FRBs that repeat. During my PhD, I published four first author papers related to this and contributed to 30 additional works in this regard.

I also led a study during undergrad/graduate school that characterizes the Galactic magnetic field using pulsars. This work was completed alongside my undergraduate mentor Joel Weisberg and colleague Joanna Rankin. While not related to FRBs, I remain very interested in pulsar science!

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 their progenitors using the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) radio telescope in British Columbia. Most recently, 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.

In addition to FRBs, I am also interested in expanding the transient radio space (not-so-fast FRBs) using both CHIME and the upcoming CHORD experiment. I also remain interested in pulsar science and am currently in the works of analyzing a 350+ hr campaign with the VLBA to get proper motions and parallax for ~80 pulsars.

I recentely became a Canadian SKA scientist. In this role, I am very excited to grow Canada's involvement in the SKA, and start thinking about how the different fields will involve in the coming years.

I am committed to creating equitable and inclusive environments in physics and astronomy, and this commitment drives a lot of the science communication and outreach that I do. I have been a member of McGill's Physics Outreach Committee since 2020, having spent over 1200 hours organizing and facilitating outreach events within 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 elementary school girls build telescopes in Minecraft over the course of 10 weeks. You can read more about Science in Space in this article.

I was also a writer and committee member for AstroBites, a graduate-student led community which writes accessible astronomy bites, for 4+ years. You can check out all of my pieces written for Astrobites here.

Please don't hesitate to reach out to me. I am always happy to talk science, whether that means working on collaborative research projects, talking about my experiences in academia, or planning astronomy outreach events. I am also always interested in working with excited undergraduates or MSc students.

And, if you still want to know more, you can find my CV here.