Luc Simard

The moment a neighbour invited a seven-year-old Luc Simard to peer through a small backyard telescope, he became enamoured with the universe beyond our planet. Decades later, that same sense of wonder still animates Simard’s work as a world-leading astrophysicist, a national science leader and a champion of collaboration that puts people first.

“I saw the craters and mountains of the moon, and I was just amazed,” he recalls. “From that point, I was hooked.”

Now Director General of the Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre at the National Research Council of Canada, Simard has helped shape Canada’s role in some of the most ambitious astronomy projects ever undertaken. Yet at the heart of his career is a deeply human story—one that traces back to his formative years at the University of Victoria.

A transformative experience at UVic

Simard completed his PhD in Physics at UVic in 1996, an experience he describes as both scientifically rigorous and profoundly communal.

“In addition to doing great science and having access to great facilities, first and foremost, it was the human experience,” he says.

He recalls engaged faculty who treated graduate education as a collective responsibility, and a close-knit student cohort that modelled the collaborative nature of modern research.

“That taught me that research today is not a one-person show,” Simard explains. “It really is a team-based effort, in which the human part of the equation is very important.” That lesson would become a throughline in his leadership philosophy.

Early in his career, Simard’s relationship with science was rooted in direct discovery—observing runs, first papers and the thrill of producing new knowledge. Over time, as his responsibilities expanded, so too did his understanding of impact.

“I went from a place where every observing run at a telescope and every paper was a profound source of satisfaction to a point where my role now is to connect incredibly brilliant, talented, dedicated people with the resources they need to be successful,” he says.

Today, his fulfillment comes from catalyzing those connections between disciplines, institutions and countries.

“When there’s a connection and then the spark turns into this incredible endeavour, this is an incredible feeling,” he reflects.

Building global teams against the odds

One initiative stands out as emblematic of Simard’s approach: leading the $50-million scientific instrument program for the Thirty Meter Telescope. The instrument—a wide-field optical spectrograph roughly the size of a highway overpass—was designed to read the “barcodes” embedded in light from hundreds of celestial objects at once, revealing their composition, age and motion.

Faced with daunting technical challenges and a complex international partnership, Simard helped bring together more than 100 scientists and engineers from the United States, Japan, China, India and Canada.

“If you looked at the geopolitics of the teams, you would have said, ‘This would never work,’” Simard says. “But it did.”

Over the course of a year, 12 international teams advanced designs for a next-generation instrument—some delivering ideas Simard had never seen before. For him, the experience underscored the potential for science to transcend borders.

“You could see the power of people in action on an instrument that had never been designed before,” he says.

A commitment to voice, equity and respect

Throughout his career, Simard has worked with Indigenous communities in Canada and abroad, where many observatories are located. He speaks with humility about the lessons he has learned from Indigenous Elders.

“I was just in awe of what we were learning from these Elders—the way they were looking at the world, the past, present and future,” he says. “Everybody must deserve a voice in what we’re doing. If that’s not the case, then we do not deserve to engage in that activity.”

Those encounters, he notes, have been defining moments, influencing decisions locally and within international governance bodies. Communities, he says, want tangible benefits and a real role in decision-making.