Assistant Professor Maya Fishbach. Photo: Diana Tyszko.
Maya Fishbach is an assistant professor with the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, whose gravitational wave research is helping revolutionize our understanding of stellar evolution, the evolution of galaxies and cosmology. In February 2024 she was awarded the 2023 John Charles Polanyi Prize for “excellence and potential of research in Physics”. The prestigious honour recognises Fishbach’s pioneering research as foundational to the burgeoning field of gravitational-wave astrophysics and acknowledges its impact both within and outside of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration.
The same month, Maya Fishbach was also distinguished with the prestigious 2024 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Sloan Research Fellowships honour exceptional Canadian and U.S. researchers whose creativity, innovation and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of scientific leaders. The fellowships are among the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early-career scholars. They are considered a marker of the quality of an institution’s faculty and proof of an institution’s success in attracting the most promising early-career researchers to its ranks.
Fishbach plays a leading role in the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA gravitational-wave collaboration and is the principal investigator in the LIGO scientific collaboration group at CITA. Her foundational work on bridging the fields of gravitational- and astro-physics is helping shape the exploding field of multi-messenger astronomy — a new realm of research that draws on observations of both gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation.
Prior to joining CITA and the University of Toronto, Maya Fishbach was a NASA Hubble Fellowship Program (NHFP) Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University (2020-2022), where she collaborated with Prof. Vicky Kalogera’s group. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 2020 under the advisory of Prof. Daniel Holz and her B.S. at Yale University in 2015.