Alex Laroche - NSERC CGS-D Scholar & DSI Doctoral Student Fellow

Hello,

And welcome to my world wide website.

I’m Alex Laroche. Third year PhD candidate, NSERC CGS-D Scholar, and DSI Doctoral Student Fellow at the University of Toronto (UofT) in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics supervised by Maria Drout & Josh Speagle.

My research focuses on binary interaction: how the exchange of mass, energy and momentum between two stars in a binary drastically impacts their evolution and ultimate fates. First, I am interested in developing data-driven techniques capable of sifting through large-scale surveys to discover new, rare populations of binaries which can then be leveraged to constrain binary evolution. Second, I use a combination of observations and theoretical modeling to meticulously examine smaller samples of interacting binaries in order to understand their past and future evolution. Current binaries of interest include binary-stripped helium stars and (some) carbon-enhanced metal poor stars.

I grew up in Montreal, Quebec. Previously, I graduated from McGill University in 2022 with an Honours Bachelor of Science in Physics. During my undergrad, my research interests primarily involved dark matter, strong gravitational lensing and 21cm cosmology. I worked in both Adrian Liu’s and Jonathan Sievers’ groups at McGill, and Jo Bovy’s group at UofT.

Beyond astrophysics, I enjoy running…as fast as possible (5/10/HM/M: 16:12/33:59/1:16/2:41).

If you would like to contact me, send me an email. If you would like to learn more about my research read here.