Rate My Professor Simon Blouin

Simon Blouin is a Banting and CITA National Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Victoria. He earned his PhD in physics from the Université de Montréal in 2019. Prior to his current appointment, he completed postdoctoral fellowships at the U.S. Los Alamos National Laboratory and at the University of Victoria. His research focuses on stellar hydrodynamics, white dwarfs, and stellar evolution, employing simulation techniques including density functional theory, molecular dynamics, and Monte Carlo simulations to improve models of white dwarfs. This work enhances the use of white dwarfs as cosmic clocks for inferring the history of star formation in the Milky Way. In 2024, Blouin co-authored a paper published in Nature titled “Buoyant crystals halt the cooling of white dwarf stars,” which identifies a distillation process in white dwarf cores involving buoyant crystal formation that interrupts cooling for billions of years and explains the properties of delayed white dwarfs observed by the Gaia satellite. He is affiliated with the Astronomy Research Centre at the University of Victoria and collaborates with Professor Falk Herwig. Blouin’s contributions advance understanding of stellar interiors and the application of white dwarfs in galactic archaeology.