Laurie Rousseau-Nepton
Assistant Professor, David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics and Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics
Laurie Rousseau-Nepton is an assistant professor in the David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics and the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics. For the past six years before joining the University of Toronto, Rousseau-Nepton was a resident astronomer at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) in Hawaii. She received her PhD from Université Laval in 2017 by studying regions of star formation in spiral galaxies using two imaging Fourier-transform spectrographs (IFTSes), one at the Mont-Mégantic Observatory and the other at the CFHT. During her thesis, she helped develop the two IFTSes used for her research and developed a unique expertise in astronomical instrumentation.
Rousseau-Nepton is currently leading an international project called SIGNALS (Star formation, Ionized Gas, and Nebular Abundances Legacy Survey) which sampled more than 50,000 star-forming regions in 40 nearby galaxies and uses the IFTSes at the CFHT to understand how the local environment affects the characteristics of young, massive stars.
On the instrumentation side, Rousseau-Nepton will be developing new instrumentation for astronomy combining the use of IFTSes with new superconductor detectors. This prototype will provide wide-field imaging spectroscopy at high resolution in the visible and near infrared. She is also dedicated to developing a new way to do science where the local cultures and the diversity of world views become an important part of teaching and research.
Rousseau-Nepton continues to explore the use of machine learning approaches to analyze large datasets and improve computational efficiency.