My career in physics has been shaped by a fascination with some of nature's rarest signals. That journey began with neutrinos, taking me from detectors buried deep in Antarctic ice to underground laboratories in Japan, and later to experiments searching for dark matter deep beneath the Canadian Shield. Along the way, I have had the opportunity to work within large international collaborations, contribute to experiments designed to answer fundamental questions about the Universe, and eventually lead one of the world's premier underground research laboratories.

In this talk, I will share the science behind these searches for rare events and the unique environments in which they take place. I will also reflect on the opportunities, challenges, and unexpected decisions that shaped my path from researcher to Executive Director of SNOLAB. Through this journey, I hope to illustrate not only how physicists explore some of the biggest mysteries in the Universe, but also why there is no single path to a rewarding career in science.

Undergraduate solid state physics classes teach us that, in conventional metals and insulators, the behaviour of electrons can be understood simply by considering them as independent particles. This approximation does not hold in systems in which electrons are said to be strongly correlated. In these materials, the strong interactions between electrons cannot be neglected. This makes the problem much more challenging from the standpoint of theoretical physics. At the same time, strong correlations between electrons can lead to exotic phenomena, such as unexpected insulating phases, or even superconductivity.

In this talk, I will discuss the remarkable (in my opinion) field of numerical physics for the study of strongly correlated electrons. I will focus on a peculiar family of materials: the cuprates. These copper oxides are superconductors with surprising properties. I will also discuss the academic and professional path that took me from Université de Sherbrooke to... Université de Sherbrooke, with a stint at a quantum computing startup. 

The James Webb Space Telescope has been rewriting our understanding of the Universe for over four years: seeing farther than ever before, piercing through cosmic dust, and revealing alien worlds in breathtaking detail. This amazing space telescope, a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, is truly unveiling cosmic wonders using infrared light. But Webb is only one piece of a much larger picture. To truly understand the cosmos, we need to see it across the full spectrum of light: from radio waves to gamma rays, each wavelength unlocking secrets invisible to the others. No single telescope tells the whole story. This talk will weave together the latest JWST discoveries and the case for multiwavelength astronomy and using a diverse suite of instruments to see and hear the Universe's entire story.

You’ve probably heard of dark matter—but what about white matter and grey matter? Join me for a playful journey into the brain, where quantum physics meets magnetic resonance imaging. MRI lets us see the brain’s remarkable structures, but there is much more to discover. I’ll show how fundamental physics can push MRI beyond its current limits, allowing us to visualize tiny tissue structures—finer than a human hair—and distinguish them with unprecedented detail. These advances could improve how we understand and diagnose brain disorders, including multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia, and bring new MRI capabilities into clinics and operating rooms. 

What does a career in physics look like if you don’t have it all planned out? In my case, it has looked something like a random walk: a path shaped by opportunities, changing interests, difficult decisions, occasional setbacks, and directions I would not have predicted when I was an undergraduate.

I’ll share some of the different directions my career in physics has taken and reflect on the experiences and choices that shaped them. Along the way, I’ll discuss moments when I pursued opportunities without knowing exactly where they would lead, times when plans changed, and the role that curiosity and community have played in my career.

Undergraduate students can feel considerable pressure to identify the “right” trajectory early: the right research area, graduate program, career goal, or carefully optimized sequence of next steps. In the words of John Lennon, "life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans" - a career isn't merely what happens after you make the right plan - it's being shaped while you're making and revising plans along the way. I hope to encourage students to remain open to unexpected opportunities, to recognize that changing direction is not the same as losing direction, and to see uncertainty not simply as something to overcome, but as a space in which interesting possibilities can appear.

Despite the remarkable success of the standard model of cosmology, the inflationary lambda CDM model, at predicting the observed structure of the universe over many scales, very little is known about the fundamental nature of its principal constituents: the inflationary field(s), dark matter, and dark energy. In this talk, I will give a brief overview of the successes of the inflationary lambda CDM model and discuss how, in the coming years, new surveys and telescopes will provide an opportunity to probe these unknown components. These surveys will produce unprecedented volumes of data, the analysis of which can shed light on the equation of state of dark energy, the particle nature of dark matter, and the nature of the inflaton field. The analysis of this data using traditional methods, however, is entirely impractical. I will share my recent work focused on developing machine learning tools for cosmological data analysis and discuss how these tools can help us overcome some of the most important computational challenges of analyzing data from the next generation of sky surveys.