Samar Safi-Harb is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manitoba and a Canada Research Chair in Supernova Remnant Astrophysics and Extreme Astrophysics.^[1][2][3] She was the Vice President of the Canadian Astronomical Society from 2020 to 2021.^[4]

Background and education

Samar Safi-Harb grew up in Lebanon during the Lebanese civil war.^[5] Despite loving physics in high school, Safi-Harb thought she would become a medical doctor and started a pre-medical physics undergraduate degree at the American University of Beirut.^[5][6][7] After her undergraduate degree, she chose to follow her passion in physics and pursued graduate studies in physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, receiving her MSc in 1993 and her PhD in 1997.^[5][8]

Following her graduate studies, Safi-Harb completed a fellowship at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center where she worked in the high energy astrophysics lab.^[5] In 2000, she left NASA to start the University of Manitoba's graduate astrophysics program.^[5][6][7]

Research

Safi-Harb's research focuses on high energy studies of the remnants leftover by supernovae, including neutron stars and their nebulae.^[1][9] In 2021, Safi-Harb and her former graduate student Harsha Blumer published their results from their observations of the magnetar Swift J1818.0−1607, first detected by the NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory in 2020, using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.^[10][11][12]