Five questions with physics professor Dr. Louise Edwards
2012-01-31 09:04:05
Dr. Louise Edwards is an assistant professor in Mount Allison’s physics department. She has studied physics and astronomy at the University of Victoria and Saint Mary’s University and did her PhD in astrophysics at Laval University. She was a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) before coming to Mount Allison in 2011. Dr. Edwards specializes in the area of galaxies and is passionate about astronomy education and outreach. In 2007, she was pictured on a Canadian stamp.
1- When did you become interested in astronomy?
I was interested in science from a young age. My dad was a high school math teacher and my mother was a high school biology teacher. I remember after high school really enjoying biology, chemistry, and physics, but physics was the science where I was most intrigued as to what it is we know and what it is we don't know. So coming out of high school physics, there was all this amazing information and I wanted to know which of it was hypothesis and which was theory. The University of Victoria has a very good astronomy program and there is a large observatory there, where I did a summer work term between my second and third year, learning about galaxies and astronomy from Dr. John Hutchings. That was a fun way to keep up with physics and get the hands-on research of analyzing real images of galaxies for the first time.
2- You came to Mount Allison from CalTech as a Post-Doc. What was your area of research there?
At Caltech I was doing even larger scale systems, so not just galaxies or clusters of galaxies, but the bridges of galaxies that exist between large clusters. These filaments of galaxies are the largest scale of structure in the universe. I was analalyzing the galaxies in these filaments using many different methods. The group I was in at CalTech launched these infrared space telescopes, so I was using data from these and combining that with radio data and optical data and trying to fit the whole story together. I was lucky enough to discover this object by accident in one of these filaments that enabled me to figure out the physical properties about that filament that are otherwise very difficult to get. It was this lighthouse object that let me determine the amount of material that was around it.
3- Why Mount Allison?
I have always loved teaching and I wanted to come back to Canada. I lived in Halifax for a couple of years for grad school and really enjoyed this side of the country. Most importantly, I chose Mount Allison for the fact that I don't have to give up my research to do the teaching and I don't have to give up my love of teaching to do my research. Both teaching and research are highly valued at Mount Allison and I love them both. I also love working with the community as well. I have been able to start up some of that work here and I feel like it is encouraged in this environment.
4- What would you most like to accomplish in your time here?
I have started a fairly regular series called "Starry Sackville," which is aimed at the university community and the community at large. "Starry Sackville" will happen every couple of months and the idea is a lecture, as well as going out and actually using our Gemini Observatory all in the same night. We talk about the theories and ideas behind a particular topic – our first one was the life and death of stars. So we talked about how stars form, what they do during their lifetime, how they die, and then we went out and looked at specific stars in their lifetimes. It's not like we are just going out and observing the sky, we are going out and observing the sky with this background knowledge of what we are looking at. The lectures are accessible to anyone. I would love to see this program grow and become really strong.
I am probably most looking forward to doing summer research projects with undergrads here.
5- How are you working to combat gender bias in physical sciences?
We are hoping to have a women in sciences group that meets casually once or twice a month over coffee to discuss issues that are particularly pertinent to women in science. It is nice at the undergraduate level to have a support network set up because as students go along in the physical sciences, the number of women gets smaller and smaller. So if they face different challenges along the way, there is that network, if only electronically, that they can access.