U of T PhD student in astronomy heads to 'bottom of the world' to upgrade telescope

noreen.rasbach — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 04:00:00 +0000

noreen.rasbach Tue, 03/27/2018 - 00:00

Cutline

“Most of the problems you come across are unique and often require novel solutions,” says Matt Young about his work at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station (photo courtesy of Matt Young)

Eric Geringas

Topic

Global Lens

Astronomy

Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics

Faculty of Arts & Science

Global

Graduate Students

When Matt Young was a kid growing up in Perth, Australia, his family would go on camping trips to the southern tip of Western Australia. There was a sign there, on the beach, saying “Next Stop: Antarctica.”

Little did he know that some 20 years later, as a University of Toronto graduate student, he’d be spending two months at the South Pole, helping upgrade the camera on a giant telescope that observes the Cosmic Microwave Background – light from the earliest days of the universe.

Last November, the third-year PhD student made the long trek from Toronto to the “bottom of the world” – the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station – taking five flights over two weeks to get there. He had just a few weeks of the Antarctic summer – 24-hour sunlight and balmy temperatures of just -30ºC – to work with another graduate student, overhauling and upgrading the telescope’s camera.

The work involved disassembling the one-tonne instrument, replacing its three lenses with ones made with a new anti-reflective coating, and the high-stakes work of assembling and installing 10 new detector wafers, delicate sensors that focus and record the microwaves captured by the camera from the telescope’s 10-metre dish. One false move or dropped screw, and the entire wafer could be rendered useless.

The telescope at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station (photo by Keith Vanderlinde)

For Young, this was the reason he had pivoted from his undergraduate engineering degree to graduate work in astronomy.

“The work I’m doing here is exactly what I love – hands-on work with a huge variety of scientific equipment,” he says. “Most of the problems you come across are unique and often require novel solutions.”

The 15-hour days of painstaking labour didn’t faze him at all – they were exactly what he had eagerly signed up for.

“There’s a huge difference between looking at diagrams of the telescope in Toronto, and actually taking things apart myself,” Young says. “Being here puts everything together. The skills I’m learning here are invaluable. I doubt I could pick them up any other way than by being directly involved.”

That’s exactly why U of T's department of astronomy and astrophysics strives to give its graduate students as many opportunities as possible to travel to the world’s most important telescopes.

“Giving graduate students the opportunity to go into the field and make these measurements themselves completely changes the experience, from sitting at a desk and having someone email you a data set into a really fully interactive science experiment where you’re running the whole show,” says Assistant Professor Keith Vanderlinde of the Faculty of Arts & Science and U of T's Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics.

“It enriches their learning experience enormously. At the end of the day, it makes them better scientists.”

As the austral summer comes to an end, Young is on his way back to warmer climes, and his PhD research with Vanderlinde.

“Seeing as my passion is scientific instrumentation, the most valuable thing you can have is hands-on experience,” he says.

“Even with the long days, I’ve loved every second of it. It just helps confirm that this is what I want to be doing as a career.”

#UofTGrad16: 217 reasons to celebrate leadership in U of T's Class of 2016

lanthierj — Fri, 10 Jun 2016 15:34:11 +0000

#UofTGrad16: 217 reasons to celebrate leadership in U of T's Class of 2016

lanthierj Fri, 06/10/2016 - 11:34

Eric Geringas

Author legacy

Eric Geringas

Topic

Subheadline

Gordon Cressy Awards recognize students who made a difference in the lives of others

Among the 18,000 members of the University of Toronto's Class of 2016 are 217 students who received special recognition for their contributions to student life and education, service to the community and volunteering hundreds of hours of their time – while maintaining excellent grades.

Many winners of the Gordon Cressy Student Leadership Award made a permanent contribution to the university community, while some created something entirely new: they saw an opportunity, and built a bridge.

See the complete list of 2016 winners

Faculty of Medicine grad Meghna Rajaprakash was instrumental in creating an extracurricular elective course for med students – a program that brings in guest lecturers to teach knowledge translation.

“I came from a research background,” says Rajaprakash, who earned a Master of Science degree before starting medical school. “What inspired me to initiate the course was seeing the large gap between scientific findings and their manifestation in tangible, usable clinical practice and policy.”

The course helps students translate the latest medical research into evidence-based clinical practice – a skill that’s only briefly covered in the packed med-school curriculum.

“When I see a gap,” she says, “I see it as an opportunity for change, rather than something negative. It fuels my passion, and inspires me to find other like-minded individuals to work on making that change.”

The course has been running for two years, and student feedback is overwhelmingly positive: more than 80 per cent of the class said they intend to apply the knowledge and skills they picked up in their future work.

Ming-Yi Bian also saw an opportunity. When she was a first-year engineering student, she joined a group that was starting a new student club at her faculty, the You’re Next Career Network. Four years later, she is graduating as its president.

The network was the result of efforts by engineering students looking to learn more about career and other opportunities for engineers. In particular, she says, first- and second-year students wanted more internships, which they felt would give them better access to summer jobs in subsequent years.

The career network drew dozens of new companies to campus career fairs, and also organized a Resume Hackathon – 300 students working on their resumes at the same time, with more than 50 mentors.

“We present our personal experiences to first-years on how to get help, and what not to be afraid of,” she says. “I can see the difference from year to year of how aware students are of how to find opportunities.”

For Satoko Nakamoto, an international student at Victoria College in Victoria University, her own experiences showed her the way to make a difference.

“When I came to U of T, my first reaction was, it’s overwhelming,” she says. “I wasn’t used to North American party culture. I did go to some frosh events, but I was really shy, and I didn’t know how to interact with people.”

Nakamoto joined VISA, the Victoria International Students’ Association, got a mentor, and saw her comfort with university life and her confidence flourish.

“VISA really helped me learn to overcome these struggles,” she says. “And then, I wanted to help other international students who may be feeling the way I did.”

Nakamoto threw herself into the work, ending up as VISA president in her final year. Under her leadership, the organization not only grew in size and profile, attracting many more international students and volunteer mentors, but got financial support from the college, which has given it stability.

And, at U of T Mississauga, business student Daniel Jayasinghe was inspired by a talk he heard as a frosh about “lollipop moments” – actions taken to improve the lives of people around you. He decided then and there that “whatever I did on campus would be something that would try to make people’s life better in some way.”

Jayasinghe was one of the student co-founders of I-CUBE, an entrepreneurial hub where students can create a business plan, learn to deliver a pitch, and get funding and mentors.

I-CUBE is now a full-scale business accelerator housed at the Institute for Management and Innovation, with partner funding, a range of programming and even an Entrepreneur-in-Residence.

“The thing I like is creating something out of nothing,” Jayasinghe says. “In any business, the key is finding a need and addressing it. Entrepreneurship forces you to be creative, to find creative solutions to problems, and to think outside the box.”

For their service to their fellow students, these four new graduates were honoured with the Cressy Award, joining a community of more than 3,400 graduates who have received the prize over the past 22 years.

At the award ceremony on April 20, the recipients were celebrated by Gordon Cressy himself, university representatives, the alumni association, their fellow students and family members.

“There were more than 200 of us,” says Bian, “and everyone did something different. It made me feel hopeful. I was much happier getting an award with 200 people than with four or five people. It means U of T has a strong community, and everyone is willing to serve.”