Faculty Profile: Adam Hincks

Adam Hincks

Assistant Professor, David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics and St. Michael’s College

Adam Hincks.Adam Hincks is an Assistant Professor cross-appointed to the David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics and St. Michael’s College, and is the inaugural holder of the Sutton Family Chair in Science, Christianity and Cultures at St. Michael’s College.

Hincks specializes in physical cosmology — the empirical study of the universe as a whole — and is an ordained Jesuit priest with training in philosophy and theology who maintains an interest in interdisciplinary questions about how theological, philosophical and scientific accounts of creation might be related.

As a member of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and Simons Observatory collaborations, he studies the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the oldest light in the universe. He also studies radio waves from neutral hydrogen gas throughout the cosmos and was previously as a member of the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) in B.C.

Hincks received his bachelor of science from U of T, his PhD in physics from Princeton University, did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia and is affiliated with the Vatican Observatory. He joined the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) and received a diploma in Philosophical Studies from Regis College, Toronto School of Theology; a bachelor of sacred theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome; and most recently a master of theology and licentiate in sacred theology at Regis College. He was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 2019.

He has written and presented on topics such as what physical cosmology says about creation from nothing; and understanding our place in the universe beyond the legacy of Stephen Hawking.

View Professor Hincks’s departmental profile