Jess McIver brings home 2025 UBC Faculty Research Award

March 10, 2026
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Artwork of a binary black hole merger. In cases like GW241011 and GW241110, where at least one black hole rotates in a peculiar direction relative to the orbital plane, the unusual spins offer hints about how the system formed. Credit: Carl Knox, OzGrav, Swinburne University of Technology. Accessed from LIGO/CALTECH https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/image/ligo20251028b.

Congratulations to Dr. Jess McIver, Associate Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy (PHAS), on being named a recipient of the 2025 UBC Faculty Research Awards. Jess has been honoured with the Charles A. McDowell Award for Excellence in Research.

The UBC Faculty Research Awards recognize outstanding academic achievements by faculty members across disciplines, from medicine and applied sciences to the humanities. Selected by committee, the awards celebrate both early-career and established researchers whose work advances knowledge and innovation.

The Charles A. McDowell Award for Excellence in Research specifically recognizes “demonstrated excellence in pure or applied scientific research by a young faculty member.”

Jess is an Associate Professor in the UBC Department of Physics and Astronomy and holds a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Gravitational Wave Astrophysics. She is currently appointed as the LIGO Scientific Collaboration’s Deputy Spokesperson. Her research explores the gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime produced by extreme cosmic events from black holes and neutron stars. This work uses observations from current ground-based detectors including LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA, as well as future missions such as the planned space-based observatory LISA.

Jess joined UBC’s Department of Physics & Astronomy in 2019 as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2024. As a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, she has contributed to work recognized with numerous international honours. These include the Physics World 2017 Breakthrough of the Year for the first multi-messenger observation involving gravitational waves, the 2017 Breakthrough of the Year awarded by Science magazine for observing the merger of two neutron stars, and the Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research awarded to the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

The collaboration’s achievements have also been recognized with the Bruno Rossi Prize from the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society, the UK Royal Astronomical Society Group Achievement Award in Astronomy, the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the Physics World 2016 Breakthrough of the Year, and the 2016 Gruber Cosmology Prize.

Congratulations, Jess, on this well-deserved and prestigious recognition.

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