Keith Vanderlinde

Prof Keith Vanderlinde is an experimental cosmologist and long-wavelength instrumentalist, currently employed as an Associate Professor at the Dunlap Institute and Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto.

He studies the nature and evolution of large-scale structures in the Universe, as well as the evolution of the cosmos itself. Studying large-scale structures requires specialized instruments and Vanderlinde is a member of collaborations using and developing ones that are unique.

One such instrument is the South Pole Telescope (SPT). The SPT surveys the sky at microwave frequencies to reveal the Cosmic Microwave Background—a snapshot of the Universe less than 400,000 years after the Big Bang.

Vanderlinde is also a member of a cross-Canada collaboration operating an innovative, digital radio telescope near Penticton, B.C. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, or CHIME, is a radio array creating a three-dimensional map of the largest volume of the Universe ever. CHIME will also be an excellent detector of radio pulsars and the newly recognized phenomenon of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). CHIME began science operations in the fall of 2017.

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