A professor out of the University of Saskatchewan has become the first Canadian to win an honourary fellowship from the U.K. Royal Astronomical Society.
Kathryn McWilliams, a professor in the department of physics and engineering physics, recently received the honour awarded to scientists in the fields of astronomy or geophysics who live outside of the United Kingdom.
"This is just really, really surprising and humbling, getting this honour," McWilliams told CTV National News.
The first tenured female faculty member in the university's physics department, McWilliams has spent most of her career working on the SuperDARN project, or Dual Auroral Radar Network, a global network of scientific radars that detect space weather.
Based at the University of Saskatchewan, SuperDARN operates more than 30 radar sites around the world.
McWilliams helped build some of the first radar towers for DARN Canada as a university student in the early 1990s.
Her research today could more precisely predict solar events before they affect satellites or hit electrical grids.
However, her work also could help more accurately forecast dates, times and locations for the aurora borealis, something that first drew her to the field she is now an expert on.
"The field overall, the research field overall, is trying to understand what causes the aurora, that's the big question," McWilliams said.
"And we know quite a few things about it, but there's a lot of things that we don't know.”
As head of SuperDARN Canada, McWilliams has led the development of a new radar system called Borealis to improve the project's stations.
The new radars are operational in Canada and two international SuperDARN partners have begun upgrading to the Borealis system.
"The better that you understand all the processes involved in creating the aurora, the better you'll be able to predict it, and that's the goal of space weather research is to try and fill in all those gaps," she said.
