J. W. T. Hessels

I am a Professor and the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Transient Astrophysics at the McGill University Department of Physics and Trottier Space Institute. I also hold appointments as a Professor at the University of Amsterdam's Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy and as a Senior Scientist at ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. I am an observational high-energy astrophysicist and radio astronomer, with over 25 years of experience in the field. Early in my career, I have worked on radio pulsars, which are neutron stars that emit lighthouse-like beams of radiation as they rotate. I discovered both the fastest-spinning neutron star known as well as the most massive neutron star known at the time. These provide strong constraints on the equation-of-state of neutron stars. I also co-led the study of a unique pulsar in a stellar triple system, which allowed us to test the universality of free fall – a central tenet of general relativity. In the past decade, the international AstroFlash research team that I founded at University of Amsterdam, ASTRON, JIVE, and McGill University has focused on understanding the fast radio burst (FRB) phenomenon. FRBs originate from distances of millions to billions of lightyears and are enormously more luminous than pulsars. Their origins remain mysterious, though we think that at least some FRBs come from the ultra-magnetised neutron stars known as magnetars. I co-led the discovery of the first-known repeating FRB source and revealed important insights into its emission. My two-dozen AstroFlash students and postdocs have made many important discoveries about FRBs, including localising them to their exact local neighbourhoods, probing their extreme plasma environments, and resolving their emission on microsecond timescales. I have co-authored two highly cited reviews on the topic of FRBs as well. Throughout my career, I have developed radio telescope systems like LOFAR and ALF that allow us to observe the sky in novel ways, to discover new transient phenomena, and to probe the extremes of the Universe.