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April 25, 2023 priority

Sarah Gallagher honored with Outstanding Science Alumni Award

Sarah Gallagher honored with Outstanding Science Alumni Award

Gallagher is the director of the Interdisciplinary Research Institute for Earth and Space Exploration and a professor of physics and astronomy at Western University in London, Canada. Her astrophysics research focuses on the powerful light-driven winds that emanate from supermassive black holes. She uses both ground and space-based observatories that span the electromagnetic spectrum to reveal the mechanisms that link the growth of the black hole found in the center of every massive galaxy to the galaxy itself. She is engaged in planning and advocating for next generation observatories to enable an ambitious science program to use time domain astrophysics—exploring how cosmic objects change over time, especially on relative short time scales—to map black holes’ inner regions.

As the first science advisor to the president of the Canadian Space Agency, Gallagher advised the agency’s Executive Committee on issues related to science investments and capacity development. She served as a liaison to the academic space science community and other government departments via the Departmental Science Advisor Network of Canada’s Chief Science Advisor. During her two terms, she advised on Open Science policies and co-founded Can COVID, the pan-Canadian pandemic research network. She teaches physics and astronomy and regularly communicates to the public about the value of space science and exploration.

Sarah obtained her Ph.D. with IGC faculty member Niel Brandt, working on X-ray observations of quasar absorption lines

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About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.