July – August – September

In this newsletter you will find a summary of recent faculty and council appointments, notable community engagements, and an overview of some of the excellent research being conducted at CITA. Additionally, our community has recently convened to recognize accomplishments, support emerging scientists, and establish new international partnerships.

We are especially happy to welcome our newest faculty member – Professor Pratika Dayal, who comes to CITA and the University of Toronto following her appointment at the University of Groningen. We also acknowledge the valued expertise joining of new members joining the CITA Council – Professor Evan McDonough, University of Winnipeg, and Professor Doug Johnstone, Principal Research Officer, Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics.

New Faculty and CITA Council Memebrs

CITA welcomes Professor Pratika Dayal from the Kapteyn Institute at Groningen University as a CITA faculty member. Prof. Dayal joined CITA on September 1^st, 2025 as a tenured Professor cross-appointed with the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. She is an expert on galactic evolution, dark matter, galaxy formation, 21cm cosmology, multi-messenger astronomy, and astro-particle physics. Prof. Dayal is the Principal Investigator of the DELPHI project. Find out about the project and the team here.

Professor Evan McDonough elected to CITA Council (2025-2029) Prof. McDonough is an Associate Professor at the University of Winnipeg and Director of the Winnipeg Institute for Theoretical Physics. He works at the intersection of high energy theoretical physics, astrophysics, cosmology, and particle physics. In his role on CITA Council, Prof. McDonough will make scientific assessments and provide recommendations for funding decisions furthering Canadian theoretical astrophysics.

Professor Doug Johnstone elected to CITA Council (2025-2027) Doug Johnstone is a Canadian astronomer and Principal Research Officer at the Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Institute of the National Research Council of Canada. He is an authority on far-infrared and sub-millimeter astronomy focusing on star and planet formation. He is PI of JWST Planets in Formation Guaranteed Time Program and CPI of JCMT Transient Survey Large Program.

Research and Publication Highlights

• (September 16) New EHT Images Reveal Black Hole’s Magnetic Field Flips Direction. Dr. Sebastiano D. von Fellenberg, a postdoctoral researcher at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIfR) and Humboldt Feodor Lynen Fellow is a key contributor to this latest Event Horizon Telescope publication. Leading the calibration of the new 2021 observations, he corrected for atmospheric interferences and slight differences between the telescopes. Other members of the EHT collaboration at the University of Toronto include CITA faculty members Ue-Li Pen and Bart Ripperda, postdoctoral fellows Gibwa Musoke and Rohan Dahale and Aviad Levis, Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department. Read more on CITA’s website.

• (August 27 – October 28) 10 Years after the first event detection LVK releases a large catalog of event candidates. Over the summer and fall, the global network of gravitational-wave observatories operated by the LIGO – Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration released a huge new logbook of cosmic collisions – its fourth Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog (GWTC-4.0). This latest update adds 128 new gravitational-wave candidates, more than doubling the count of logged events to date. The CITA Flagship and CITA Inc Gravitational-Wave researchers (Reed Essick, Maya Fishbach, Aditya Vijaykumar, Aryanna Schiebelbein-Zwack, Utkarsh Mali, Amanda Farah, Samar-Safi Harb, Labani Mallick) have a central role in this important international collaboration. Find more details and a list of published papers below: CITA Researchers Spearhead Astrophysical Interpretation of Record-Breaking Gravitational Wave Run; New events from LIGO’s 4th Observing Run Match Formation Channel Predicted by CITA Fellow Claire Shi Ye

• (July 4) Ioana Zelko, CITA Postdoctoral Fellow and Bart Ripperda, faculty member, have been awarded 32K A100 GPU-Hours on Saturn Cloud for their project, ”GPU Framework for Real-Time Calculation of 3D Interstellar Radiation Fields”. NVIDIA is donating the GPU hours to CITA as part of its Academic Grant Program. Check out The First 3D Dust Temperature Map visualization created by Ioana Zelko.

Events, Workshops, Collaborations

Left to right in the back: Prof. Dick Bond, Prof. Ue-Li Pen, Prof. Pratika Dayal, Prof. Norman Murray, Prof. Reed Essick. At the front: CITA Director Shantanu Basu and Professor Jun’ichi Yokoyama, Director of IPMU.

(September 12) Signing Ceremony for a new MoU between CITA and IPMU, University of Tokyo
Expanding the frontiers of collaboration with a new memorandum of agreement between the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics and the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU) at The University of Tokyo. Professor Jun’ichi Yokoyama, Director of IPMU, visited from Japan for a special signing ceremony that took place at CITA. As CITA Director, Shantanu Basu, pointed out, the signing of this MoU will enhance personal ties and initiate plans for many collaborations and mutual visits between the two institutes: “Our two institutions are committed to a free flow of ideas and visitors as we jointly explore the most fundamental questions about the Universe.

(August 22) 2025 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellows Receive their Certificates
Congratulations to CITA SURFers 2025, who completed their summer research projects with stellar presentations on August 22 and celebrated their achievements with cake! Thank you to all the supervisors and mentors (Reed Essick, Maya Fishbach, Aditya Vijaykumar, Ioana Zelko, PhD, Biprateep Dey, Claire Shi Ye, Neige Frankel, Aryanna Schiebelbein-Zwack) for your hard work and guidance! Another summer to remember at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics.

(August 12) Celebrating CITA Scholarship and Achievements. The CITA community came together to celebrate a remarkable season of success. We honoured our brilliant faculty and research fellows for their outstanding achievements and recent prestigious awards. CITAzens were especially honoured to be joined by the University of Toronto President Melanie Woodin, who shared in the celebration and personally congratulated Prof. Dick Bond (Shaw Prize in Astrophysics) and Prof. Norman Murray (FCAP, FAAAS, U.S. National Academy of Sciences Member, FAAS) on their exceptional distinctions. Other special guests were Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Director of Discovery Research and Recognition Sarah Overington and Vice-Provost, Strategic Enrolment Management Dwayne Benjamin. It was an inspiring afternoon recognizing the groundbreaking work happening at CITA and the incredible talent that drives it. On October 21st, Prof. Bond accepted the Shaw Prize in Astrophysics at a special ceremony in Hong Kong. Listen to his Laureate talk.

(July 2) A group of CITAzens visited the vault of the University of Toronto Art Museum. They saw rarely displayed Canadian Heritage artworks. Special thanks to CITA graduate student Nathan Carlson for organizing this visit and Alex King (Collections Coordinator at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto) for showing us around!

From left to right: Prof. Peter Martin, Prof. Dick Bond, Director Shantanu Basu, President Melanie Woodin, Prof. Norman Murray.