2025 Medal Winners | francais

PRESS RELEASE / FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The 2025 CAP Herzberg Medal

is awarded to

Jo Bovy

"I'm very honored to receive this award from the Canadian Association of Physicists. As an astrophysicist working to constrain the nature of dark matter through the use of astronomical observations, it is very rewarding to see my efforts in this area receiving recognition from the wider physics community." winner quote

The Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) is pleased to announce that the 2025 CAP Herzberg Medal is awarded to Jo Bovy, University of Toronto, in recognition of profound and original contributions to our understanding of the formation, evolution, and current dynamical structure of the Milky Way. announcement

One of the most fundamental questions in the study of the Universe is: How do galaxies form and evolve from their humble beginnings as tiny fluctuations in the density of matter only fractions of a second after the Big Bang, into the majestic celestial objects that we observe today, fourteen billion years later? Working in the fields of galactic dynamics, galaxy formation and evolution, the astrophysical study of dark matter, and astrostatistics, Jo Bovy has made significant contributions to our understanding of this question. By combining data from various large-scale surveys of the Milky Way, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Gaia mission, and the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment, with sophisticated chemo-dynamical modeling and machine-learning techniques, Bovy has been able to map the stellar structure of the Milky Way in unprecedented detail from its innermost bar-shaped region to the outer stretches of the ghostly stellar halo surrounding the disk and he has determined the distribution of dark matter in the Milky Way with high precision, deriving strong constraints on the fundamental nature of dark matter. Bovy has also written widely used software tools for research in astrophysics, such as the galpy Python package, and has developed new statistical methods for analyzing large astronomical datasets. He has authored or co-authored more than 150 papers in leading scientific journals and he is the author of a widely used textbook on the dynamics and astrophysics of galaxies that is freely available online. nominator citation

ABOUT the Medal

The CAP Herzberg medal recognizes significant achievement in any field of research by an early-career Canadian physicist (i.e. successfully defended their doctoral thesis within the 12 years prior to the award). The annual CAP Herzberg Medal was introduced in 1970. Prior to 2011, the medal was awarded for outstanding achievement by a Canadian physicist under the age of 40. medal description

ABOUT the Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP)

The Canadian Association of Physicists, founded in 1945, is a professional association representing over 1600 individual physicists and physics students in Canada, the U.S. and overseas, as well as a number of Corporate, Institutional, and Departmental Members. In addition to its learned activities, the CAP, through its charitable arm - the CAP Foundation, also undertakes a number of activities intended to encourage students to pursue a career in physics. cap description

joint description

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For more information, please contact:

Mrs. Francine Ford, Executive Director
Canadian Association of Physicists
Tel: 343-361-3326
E-mail: execdir@cap.ca
www.cap.cacap contact and joint contact