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Christine D. WilsonProfessor Department of Physics and Astronomy Office: ABB-351, ABB-241 Phone: (905) 525-9140 x27483 |
Christine Wilson did her undergraduate work at the University of Toronto and her graduate work at the California Institute of Technology. After receiving her Ph.D. in 1990, she spent two years as a postdoc at the University of Maryland before joining the faculty at McMaster in 1992. She is currently the Canadian Project Scientist for the (Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) (see also Canadian ALMA page), which was recommended as the highest priority for Canadian participation in a major, new, ground-based observatory in the report of the Long Range Planning Panel, "The Origins of Structure in the Universe" . She has also recently received a Premier's Research Excellence Award.
Dr. Wilson's current research interests are centered on the interstellar medium and star formation, both in nearby galaxies and in our own Milky Way. She is particularly interested in the properties of giant molecular clouds, the nature of the interstellar medium in dwarf galaxies, the mechanisms regulating star formation rates and efficiencies in galaxies, and the properties of low-mass protostars in nearby molecular clouds. Since many of these problems require a multi-wavelength approach, Dr. Wilson uses a wide variety of optical and radio telescopes, including the Submillimeter Array (SMA), the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT). A large part of her observational work is concentrated in the regime of millimeter-wave radio interferometry, where high-resolution images of the emission from molecules in the interstellar medium can be obtained. She is one of six Canadian project scientists on the astronomical satellite ODIN, which is studying water and oxygen in the interstellar medium and was launched in late February 2001. She is also an Associate Scientist with the SPIRE instrument for the Herschel satellite.
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