Congratulations to Kate Maguire

by Henri Boffin on 2023-11-28

The 4MOST Project congratulates Kate Maguire from Trinity College Dublin for being awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant, CosmicLeap, to explore the deaths of white dwarfs, mapping the full diversity of ways in which these bodies explode. This will be crucial for defining new precision samples for cosmology, as well as determining the rates and contributions of white dwarf explosions to the origin of the elements.

"One of the key aims of the project is to obtain rapid spectroscopy of the largest sample of white-dwarf transients to date," explains Kate. "The first days after explosion are when the signatures of their diversity is greatest and these spectra will be crucial for distinguishing between explosion scenarios. I'm excited to work closely with the 4MOST team and members of the S10 Time Domain Extragalactic Survey (TiDES) to achieve my research aims."

Kate obtained her PhD from Queen's University Belfast before taking up a post-doctoral research position at the University of Oxford. She held Marie Skłodowska-Curie and ESO fellowships at the European Southern Observatory headquarters in Munich from 2013-2015 and an Ernest Rutherford Fellowship at Queen's University Belfast from 2015-2019. She is currently an Associate Professor at Trinity College Dublin.