KEYNOTE SPEAKER- JAYMIE MATTHEWS 2010
Jaymie Matthews is an astro-paparazzo who unveils the hidden lifestyles of stars by eavesdropping on “the music of the spheres.” His version of an interstellar iPod is Canada’s first space telescope, MOST (Microvariability & Oscillations of STars), which detects vibrations in the light of ringing stars too subtle to be seen even by the largest telescopes on Earth. Dr. Matthews is the Mission Scientist leading the Canadian Space Agency’s MOST project, and a Professor of astrophysics in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of British Columbia. He is trying to revise the biography of our Sun – past and future – by studying its neighbours in our galactic city, the Milky Way. His research sounds more like astromedicine than astrophysics: performing “ultrasound” on stellar embryos, checking on the hyperactivity of a pre-teen sun, and taking the pulses of stars in their twilight years. Dr. Matthews and his team are also using MOST to forecast the weather on planets beyond the Solar System, and they have begun the search for Terra Nova – alien Earths around other stars.
Dr. Matthews is a leading expert in the field of stellar seismology: literally using the surface vibrations of vibrating stars to probe their hidden interiors and histories. He was born in Chatham, Ontario, and obtained his B.Sc. degree at the University of Toronto, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Western Ontario. Dr. Matthews held Isaac Walton Killam and NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowships at UBC, and an Attaché de Recherche position at the Université de Montreal, before taking on a faculty position at UBC in 1992.
In addition to heading the MOST Mission, Dr. Matthews has sat on Canada’s scientific steering committees for the international Gemini Twin 8-Metre Telescopes Project and the Far-Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer satellite, and the Joint Committee on Space Astronomy which advises the Canadian Space Agency and the Canadian Astronomical Society. He is a member of the International Astronomical Union’s Commission on Variable Stars, and a frequent invited review speaker at meetings around the world, from Prague to Porto, Moscow to Mmbatho (South Africa), Cancun to Carinthia, and Santiago to the Sunshine Coast. He has authored or co-authored more than 100 refereed scientific papers. In 2006, Dr. Matthews was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada. Astronomy education and public outreach are also very important facets of Dr. Matthews’ scientific career. He serves on the Board of the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre (and was its Vice-President for one term). Dr. Matthews was awarded a 1999 Killam Prize for teaching excellence in the UBC Faculty of Science, as well as the 2002 Teaching Prize of the Canadian Association of Physicists. His media adventures include appearances on CBC, CTV, Global, CNN, CityTV Vancouver and Toronto, and Space: The Imagination Station. He also posed in multiple guises (from a superhero flying in the ozone layer to an X-ray version of Austin Powers) in the Discovery Channel documentary series “Light: More Than Meets The Eye”. He has yet to live down being quoted in Discover Magazine as saying “Exploding Star Contains Atoms from Elvis Presley’s Brain – Scientists Confirm the King of Rock & Roll Lived in Another Galaxy 170,000 Years Ago!”