Past and present research interests

  • Instrumentation: Beauty and the Beast, an aperture polarimeter used at the Mont Mégantic Astronomical Observatory
  • Young stars (T Tauris, Herbig Ae/Be), especially those in close binary systems - polarimetric studies of those objects
  • Numerical simulations of Thomson or Mie scattering circumbinary envelopes
  • Polarimetry of comets (Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake)
  • Polarimetry of stars: AGB, Ap, Wolf-Rayet
  • Polarimetry of the interstellar medium
  • Spectroscopy of young stars
  • Instrumenation: the ESPaDOnS spectropolarimeter
  • Spectroscopy and spectropolarimetry of Be stars and hot stars with dust
  • Herbig Ae/Be stars survey
  • Spectropolarimetry: Astrobiology and the Solar System


Publications


Duties at CFHT

  • Support astronomer for GECKO, the high resolution (R~100,000) Coudé spectrograph (not offered anymore).
  • Astronomer for CAFE, the fiber feed to the Coudé focus, successfully commissionned in July 2000.
  • Member of the local organizing committee for the ADASS IX, conference, first editor for the proceedings (1999).
  • CFHT project scientist for the spectropolarimeter ESPaDOnS, commissionned at the end of 2004.
  • Member of the local organizing committee for the Astrophysical Ages and Timescales conference, which was held in Hilo, in February 2001, and one of the editors for the proceedings.
  • Participation in the QSO observations, as one of the Queue coordinators (for CFH12k, MegaCam, WIRCam, and ESPaDOnS), since 2001.
  • Member of the Scientific Organisation Committee for the conference Astronomical Polarimetry - Current Status and Future Directions, which was held in March 2004.
  • Support astronomer for the spectropolarimeter ESPaDOnS (Classical and QSO modes).
  • Member of the local and scientific organizing committees for the conference Astronomical Polarimetry 2008 - Science from Small to Large Telescopes, which was held July 6-11 2008 in La Malbaie (QC), and one of the editors for the proceedings.
  • QSO manager since the summer of 2008.
  • Project Scientist for OPERA, the Open source Pipeline for Espadons data Reduction and Analysis
  • CFHT representative on the Mauna Kea Observatories Outreach Committee (now Mauna Kea Astronomy Outreach Committee)


Professional Development

  • Supervisory Development Series, training provided by Hawaii Employers Council, Sep. 2010
  • The Effective Leader Program, 5-day seminar presented by Frontier Associates Inc., 2003