Summer Research Plans: Prof. Adam Hincks

Professor Adam Hincks hopes to continue several lines of research this summer. First, he will accompany the Gilson Seminar students as their chaplain in and near Rome. The Gilson Seminar is a St. Michael’s College first-year seminar that explores the intersection of faith with today’s most important questions. Thanks to the generosity of donors, the seminar consists of two half-year courses, followed by a two-week international learning experience in Rome that explores the roles that the Catholic Church and Vatican have played in ecology, science, literature, and politics. Hincks will also help guide the Gilson students’ visit to the Vatican Observatory, located in the hills near Rome, where he is an adjunct scholar.

He’ll then spend some time at the Vatican Observatory, meeting with other cosmologists affiliated with the Observatory, as well as the other astronomers based there, and visit with some colleagues at the University of Rome’ La Sapienza’.

In addition, together with a postdoc and graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Toronto, Hincks is currently working on data analysis from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope. It’s a large millimetre observatory in Chile designed to study the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is the oldest light in the Universe.

Plus, he’s contributing to the software infrastructure for both the Simons Observatory, a new CMB facility also based in Chile that is searching for our cosmic origins, as well as the Hydrogen Intensity and Real-Time Analysis eXperiment (HIRAX) in South Africa.

On top of all that, in July, he’ll present some work on HIRAX he’s done with an undergraduate student over the past year at a conference in Montreal, and he also plans to attend the Simons Observatory collaboration meeting in San Diego.