Sara Ellison joined the University of Victoria in 2003 from Cambridge and is an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Choosing UVic was an easy decision for Sara. She was offered a faculty position with a Canada Research Chair (CRC), in combination with UVic’s location and strength in her field of astronomy.

An early interest in astronomy

Sara’s keen interest in astronomy dates back to her high school years when she was given a book that started her off stargazing in the back garden. Soon after, she had a new physics teacher at school who was also very interested in astronomy. He’d often get sidetracked on the topic, so she learned quite a lot. Finally, when Sara was an undergraduate, she spent several summers working at observatories around the world—travelling to exotic places, working on the tops of extinct volcanoes studying the stars. She was hooked!

New avenues of research

Because Sara holds a CRC chair, the majority of her time is spent on research. The environment at UVic has encouraged her to develop new avenues of research in galaxy formation and evolution. Sara finds this really exciting and believes these avenues would have been unlikely to develop elsewhere. She really appreciates the people she works with locally, ranging from other professional astronomers in Victoria (both at UVic and the Herzberg Institute for Astrophysics) to our high quality post-docs and students.

Sara works with a modest-sized local team of one other (adjunct) faculty member, two post-docs and two graduate students. (There are a few other team members outside Victoria.) The team members are excellent and a great pleasure to work with. Sara counts herself as very fortunate to be able to lead a project that she finds exciting and to work with such a productive and enjoyable team.

Grant funding

Sara has been very successful in obtaining financial support through national grants. She says one of the most important sources of daily support is on the computational side. A portion of her grant funding was used to purchase a large beowulf computer cluster to run intensive data reduction and theoretical models.  She has received incredible support within the department and from computer services for the purchase and maintenance of this cluster.

Sara has been the recipient of numerous awards and recognition. Her PhD thesis (2000) was runner-up for the national thesis prize in the UK award by the Royal Astronomical Society. In 2004, she was awarded the Annie Jump Cannon Prize by the American Astronomical Society, which recognizes an outstanding junior female astronomer and in 2009, she received UVic's Faculty of Science Research Excellence Award.

What’s next

Sara’s group is currently in the process of obtaining a completely new set of data to measure the amount of gas in galaxy mergers. This project will use the world's largest radio and submillimetre telescopes, which is a new direction for Sara as she has always used optical telescopes. She is very excited at the prospect of learning new techniques and the questions it will help tackle with a unique dataset.

When not stargazing, Sara can be found running and training for triathlons. Learn more about physics and astronomy at UVic.