Dominic Couture

Dominic is currently a Ph.D. candidate at iREx under the supervision of René Doyon and Jonathan Gagné. His research focuses on nearby young associations, groups of stars, mainly low-mass M dwarfs, formed at the same epoch by the collapse of a molecular cloud and located in the solar neighborhood, that share a common kinematics. They are ideal laboratories for the study of the last steps of stellar formation and direct imaging of exoplanets.

During his studies, he created a new numerical method, called kanya, capable of finding a kinematic age of a nearby young association via a traceback method using data from the Gaia DR3 Catalog. He applied this method, in which the trajectories of stars are traced back up to the point where their spatial extent was minimal, to a sample of 25 validated members of the β Pictoris Moving Group.

In 2019, Dominic completed his M.Sc. at Université de Montréal also under the supervision of René Doyon. He completed his undergraduate studies at Université Laval in physics in the spring of 2017 with an option in astrophysics. In 2016, he completed an internship in medical physics during which he worked on a dosimetric index calculation algorithm in radiotherapy and on a framework for patient dose tracking in radiology.

Supervisor

René Doyon