Congratulations: Prof. Victoria Kaspi, Rutherford Memorial Medal in Physics

Congratulations to Prof. Victoria Kaspi (Department of Physics), who has been selected to receive the 2007 Rutherford Memorial Medal in Physics from the Royal Society of Canada. The awards ceremony will take place on Saturday, November 17, 2007.

The award citation reads as follows:

"Victoria Kaspi is a world leader in one of the most exciting areas of modern research, astrophysics. Recently she and her students showed that the objects known as soft gamma repeaters and anomalous X-ray pulsars share a common nature, as predicted uniquely by the magnetar model in which they are both extremely magnetized neutron stars. Her important work on the link between pulsars and supernova remnants was the subject of articles in The New York Times, Science News, Sky News, The Washington Post, Astronomy, and the Boston Globe, to name a few, and was presented on CNN and the National Public Radio.

"This is only the most recent of her many accomplishments, which have been recognized numerous times: she was awarded the Canadian Association of Physicists Herzberg Medal, was a NSERC Steacie Fellow, is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and a winner of the CIAR Young Explorer Prize, and is a Canada Research Chair. As her record shows Kaspi is an exceptionally talented physicist, who is internationally renowned for her work on neutron stars, pulsars and supernovae remnants. Victoria Kaspi's important work is being done at the cutting edge of current research in physics, and indeed of all science."