Prof. Maria Drout is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto and a Dunlap Associate. She also holds a Research Associate position at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science.

In 2017, she was a member of the team that was the first ever to identify the visual component of an event that generated gravitational waves detected on Earth. The event was the merger of two neutron stars which resulted in a kilonova.

She earned a Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Harvard University in 2016 for her research on the use of peculiar transients as probes of stellar evolution and mass loss. During this time, she was part of the team that ran the PanSTARRS1 Medium Deep Survey. She previously earned a Master of Advanced Study in Theoretical Physics (M.A.St.) from the University of Cambridge in 2011 and a Bachelor of Science in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Iowa in 2010. She was a NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institute for Science from 2016 to 2018.

Media availability: TV, Radio, Print/Online