Ingrid Stairs Named 2025 Fellow in the Royal Society of Canada

October 7, 2025
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2025 UBC RSC Fellows

Congratulations Prof. Ingrid Stairs, for being named a 2025 Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC). This recognition is the greatest national honour awarded in the Arts, Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences, for those who have made exceptional scholarly achievements to science and culture. 

Ingrid will be inducted into the 2025 Fellows and Members of the RSC college as one of five UBC Science professors this year. Nominated by her peers for her outstanding research in her field of Fast Radio Bursts (FBRs), Ingrid’s induction to the RSC will be officially announced and celebrated at the RSC Celebration of Excellence and Engagement in Montréal, Québec, on November 14th, 2025. 

The RSC College opened in 1883 as a National organization that distinguishes individual merit in “scholarly, research, or artistic excellence” and “recognizes leaders in order to help them build a better future in Canada and around the world”. 

Ingrid is a PHAS faculty member and leading expert in FBR’s, the radio observations of pulsars from distant galaxies. These rapidly spinning, highly magnetized remnants of massive stars act like cosmic lighthouses, sending out precise radio signals that help us explore matter at incredibly high densities and test Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. Her research also includes studying binary pulsar evolution, pulsar instrumentation and polarimetry, and some observations at other wavelengths.

She is a founding member of the NANOGrav collaboration, which in 2023 announced groundbreaking evidence for a low-frequency gravitational-wave background — a faint cosmic hum rippling through spacetime. Ingrid also plays a key role in the team behind the Canadian CHIME telescope, which is uncovering mysterious FBR’s and discovering new pulsars across the sky.

Ingrid has taught multiple courses in Astronomy and Astrophysics including Galactic Astronomy, astrophysical measurements and high energy astrophysics. Past awards include the 2017 Royal Society of Canada Rutherford Memorial Medal in Physics, the Canadian Astronomical Society Peter G. Martin award for Mid-career Achievement and honour as Senior Fellow, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Cosmology & Gravity/Gravity & Extreme Universe programs.

 

Congratulations on this incredible honour as a new RSC Fellow, Ingrid!

 

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