Gwendolyn Eadie, who completed her doctoral studies at McMaster under the supervision of Dr. William Harris, is the recipient of the J. S. Plaskett Medal for 2018.

The award is made annually to the Ph.D. graduate from a Canadian university who is judged to have submitted the most outstanding doctoral thesis in astronomy or astrophysics in the preceding two calendar years.

Her thesis, entitled “Lights in Dark Places: Inferring the Milky Way Mass Profile using Galactic Satellites and Hierarchical Bayes”, she developed a high-level statistical method to derive the mass and mass distribution within astrophysical systems. Mass is a fundamental variable driving the evolution of galaxies like our Milky Way, but it is notoriously difficult to measure due to the fact that it is dominated by the dark matter extending well beyond the visible starlight.

Eadie is now a Moore-Sloan, Washington Research Foundation, and DIRAC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Astronomy and the eScience Institute at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA.

Originally published by The Canadian Astronomical Society.