Prof. Marten Van Kerkwijk is a Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, with interests covering much of astronomy but a focus on compact objects (“stellar corpses”), stars and binaries, their structure, formation, and evolution, and their use to infer fundamental physical properties.

He grew up in Haarlem (The Netherlands) and obtained his MSc (1988) and PhD (1993) at the University of Amsterdam. In the next years (1994-1996), he broadened his horizons as a Hubble Fellow at Caltech and, a bit briefly (1997 to mid-1998), as a postdoc at IoA. After that, Van Kerkwijk was first junior and then senior lecturer/researcher at Utrecht University. He then moved to UofT in 2003, joining a wonderful department, university, city, and country. In 2013, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to help make progress in his research on merging white dwarfs and thermonuclear supernovae, although he used the time in part to start on a new venture, “scintillometry”, where one tries to use the interstellar medium as a giant interferometer to study pulsars. He continues to work on this field, and in 2019 was awarded a Killam fellowship to pursue it.

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