Leslie Moranta is the recipient of the 2025 Lumbroso Grant

The Lumbroso IREx Ambassador Grant is awarded this year to Leslie Moranta, a PhD student at Université de Montréal and the Montréal Planetarium, under the supervision of Jonathan Gagné, adjunct professor at Université de Montréal and scientific advisor at the Montréal Planetarium. This student stands out for her natural leadership and desire to build bridges between research and society. Committed to both her scientific projects and outreach to the public, she has been a proud ambassador for our institute since joining in 2020.

Leslie’s work focuses on discovering new groups of young stars located near the Sun. She uses gyrochronology, a method that relies on the rate at which stars rotate on their axes to estimate their age. She is also interested in searching for new young exoplanets around these stars. She is currently leading a program to detect such planets around low-mass stars using the NIRPS spectrograph. She is also co-investigator on an observation program with the James Webb Space Telescope dedicated to studying a very cold young brown dwarf. Leslie uses several modern machine learning tools for all of her projects. Her work may lead to the discovery of new brown dwarfs and isolated objects of planetary mass and, more broadly, aims to better understand the formation and evolution of stars and their planetary systems.

Alongside her ambitious research projects, Leslie is deeply committed to science communication and outreach. At IREx, she contributes to numerous activities aimed at secondary school and college students, such as career days and the Séjour découverte. In 2023-2024, she mentored a team of young people as part of the InitiaSciences program, guiding them throughout the year in a tailored research project.

She also helps organize major public events hosted by the Montreal Planetarium, including Astrofest and the Researchers’ Night. She regularly gives public lectures, gives media interviews, and handles communications for Astronomy on Tap Montréal, a group of young researchers who organise fun and welcoming science nights in local bars.

Leslie took part in several initiatives related to the 2024 solar eclipse. Credit: A. Philibert, Université de Montréal.

Committed to making scientific circles more inclusive, she sits on the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) committees of IREx and Space for Life. While pursuing her bachelor’s degree in physics and computer science, she also co-founded the Regroupement des femmes en informatique de l’Université de Montréal (UdeM Women in Computer Science Group).

All IREx members warmly congratulate her!

About the Lumbroso Grant

The Lumbroso Grant for IREx Ambassador is awarded each year to a graduate student of the Université de Montréal who is a member of IREx to recognize their leadership, community involvement and efforts to promote scientific culture to a wide audience. This award is made possible by a generous donation from Sylvain Lumbroso, a long-time supporter of IREx.

Previous recipients of the scholarship are Leslie Moranta, Alexandrine L’Heureux, Érika Le Bourdais, Thomas Vandal, and Marylou Fournier-Tondreau.