Learning to be a radio astronomer

Little did I know when I started graduate school that I would end up working in radio astronomy: it seemed too difficult, too exotic, and frankly too technical for my background at the time. However, my interest in understanding how stars form, combined with an invitation from a professor to try out collecting data with the new 3-telescope radio telescope array at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory, started me on this path. In my talk, I will describe a few key milestones from my early career, and then talk about the research that my students and I have been carrying out with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array studying some of the most extreme star-forming galaxies in the local universe.

Biography:

Christine Wilson is internationally recognized for her work on star formation and gas in nearby galaxies. She received her B.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 1984 and her Ph.D. from Caltech in 1990. She has been at McMaster University since 1992 and holds the rank of Distinguished University Professor. She was the Canadian Project Scientist for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) from 1999 to 2010 and a member of the science team for the SPIRE instrument on the Herschel Space Observatory from 2001-2015. She has been a role model and committed ambassador for astronomy in Canada for three decades.