Dr. Ziggy Pleunis

Biography

Ziggy Pleunis is an assistant professor in high-energy astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam and a visiting scientist at ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. He obtained his PhD from McGill University in 2020, focusing on the detection and characterization of fast radio bursts using the CHIME telescope. His thesis work received recognition, securing prizes from the IAU Division D and the Canadian Astronomical Society. Before joining the University of Amsterdam, Ziggy was an independent Dunlap postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto's Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, starting in January 2024. His research primarily focuses on the detection and characterization of fast radio bursts, with the aim of unraveling the origins of extragalactic transients and developing astrophysical tools to further understand the universe at large. As a radio astronomer, he has broad experience across multiple wavelengths and has collaborated on studies involving pulsars and fast radio bursts using data from CHIME, LOFAR, Arecibo, Green Bank, and Fermi optical telescopes. Ziggy is a member of the CHIME/FRB Collaboration and played a key role in the design, construction, and commissioning of the CHIME/FRB experiment during his PhD at McGill University. He was part of the team that discovered the lowest-frequency millisecond pulsars among fast radio bursts detected by the LOFAR telescope.

Research Interests

Experience