Rate My Professor Maya Fishbach

Maya Fishbach is an Assistant Professor at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) at the University of Toronto. She earned her PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Chicago in 2020, where she was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, she served as a NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) at Northwestern University.

Fishbach is a gravitational-wave astrophysicist and member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. Her research focuses on the population properties of merging black holes and neutron stars observed through gravitational waves, including their mass distributions, spin alignments, merger rates and their evolution with redshift, formation channels, and implications for massive star evolution and binary interactions. She has contributed to measurements of the Hubble constant using gravitational-wave standard sirens in combination with galaxy catalogs and other methods, as well as analyses of the delay time distribution between black hole formation and merger. Fishbach has received the 2023 John Charles Polanyi Prize in Physics, a 2024 Sloan Research Fellowship, and the 2025 Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy. She has led or contributed to key publications analyzing data from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration, including population studies from the second gravitational-wave transient catalog.