Students at the Institute

Etsuko Mieda did her undergrad in Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley.

She is now a graduate student at UofT, working with Prof. James Graham on a small adaptive optics project. Adaptive optic systems help reducing the effect of the atmosphere on observations.

Etsuko is currently building a wavefront sensor, which tells her how the atmosphere changes the incoming light. This project involves computer simulation, hands-on assembly, and data analysis.

Max Millar-Blanchaer has undergraduate degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics from Queen's University, and will be beginning graduate studies in astronomy in the fall at UofT.

He is interested in instrumentation, exoplanet discovery, galaxy evolution and supernovae.

Max did a summer research project working in Prof. Dae-Sik Moon's lab, working on detector characterization for the Wide Integral Field Infrared Spectrograph (WIFIS), a next generation spectrograph in development here at UofT.

Meet the grad students of
the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics

To know what it's like to be a young researcher in Astronomy at the University of Toronto, there's no better source than the graduate students in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics.

In this video, Jacqueline, Bryce and Mubdi give us three completely different viewpoints on Astronomy, and tell us:

- How they got into it,
- What their day-to-day job is like,
- Why it all matters.

Whether it is the night sky that makes you dream, the technology that excites you, or the mind-bending questions that inspire you, each of these passions can lead to Astronomy.

You'll also need healthy servings of curiosity, hard work and persistence.