Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo

Education and career

Hlavacek-Larrondo grew up in Montreal, of mixed Czech and Chilean ancestry. Her mother, Lidia Larrondo, worked as a chemist after studying in Russia and escaping to Canada from the 1973 Chilean coup d'état. Hlavacek-Larrondo was a student at the Université de Montréal, where she received her bachelor's and master's degrees. Her master's degree work focused on the kinematics of the Sculptor Group of galaxies. She completed her Ph.D. in astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, in 2012, studying supermassive black holes under the supervision of Andrew Fabian.

After postdoctoral research as an Einstein Fellow at Stanford University, she returned to the Université de Montréal in 2013, and was given her Canada Research Chair in Observational Astrophysics of Black Holes in 2014. The chair was renewed in 2020.

In 2014, she co-founded the project "Parité physique" (later enlarged to "Parité science") to increase the participation of women in physics and science.