CHIME Wins Prestigious Governor General’s Innovation Award

The team behind the Canadian-based radio telescope CHIME (the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment) has been awarded the fifth annual Governor General’s Innovation Award.

Announced Tuesday by the Rideau Hall Foundation, these awards recognize and celebrate exceptional Canadian individuals, teams, and organizations who have “developed new or better ways of creating value and who are having a meaningful impact on our quality of life.” Since it began taking data in 2017, CHIME has made diverse discoveries on fast radio bursts and cosmology. The Rideau Hall Foundation describes CHIME as “addressing some of the most profound questions facing contemporary astrophysics.”

The CHIME team includes almost two dozen scientists and students from the University of Toronto, drawn from the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA), David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, along with scientists from across Canada and internationally.

Over the years, many CITAzens has been part of the CHIME team such as CITA Professor Dick Bond, CITA Professor Ue-Li Pen, Adam Hincks (now UofT professor), Xin Wang (former CITA Post Doctoral Fellow, now professor at Sun Yat Sen University in China), Hsiu-Hsien Lin (currently CITA Post Doctoral Fellow), James McKee (currently CITA Post Doctoral Fellow), Jing Luo (currently CITA Post Doctoral Fellow), Dongzi Li (currently CITA graduate student), James Willis (currently CHIME-CIRADA Computing Specialist), Niels Opperman (former CITA Post Doctoral Fellow), Simon Foreman (former CITA Post Doctoral Fellow, now at Perimeter Institute), Richard Shaw (former CITA Post Doctoral Fellow, now at UBC) and Philippe Berger (former CITA graduate student).

The Governor General Innovation Awards are run by the Rideau Hall Foundation and the Office of the Secretary to the Governor General. They choose recipients each year who are nominated from a national network of organizations that act as nominating partners.

For more information, please contact:
Jade Shi
Program Assistant
Canadian Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA),
University of Toronto
(416) 978 1777
scint@cita.utoronto.ca