Between skates and stars

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By: Emile Shen

Gwendolyn Eadie once toured with Disney on Ice across North and South Americas as an ice dancer. These days, she still laces up her skates for the McMaster Varsity Women’s Figure Skating Team, but you can also find her in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, where she is a PhD candidate.

Eadie began her undergraduate career at Simon Fraser University as an English major. Her interest in math and science was present throughout her childhood, but it was not until she took a first-year astronomy class that her interest developed into an academic pursuit.

Eadie credits this development to her astronomy professor. “When you have a teacher that is really inspiring and can convey the material really well… if you have an innate interest, then when you have a prof that can bring that out of you, that’s when you hope you can go into that field.”

“The turning point was when I wrote an English paper about the Hubble Space Telescope. Maybe English wasn’t the right thing for me,” she reminisced.

Now in the third year of her doctoral studies, her work focuses on calculating the mass of the Milky Way Galaxy.

To many of us, conquering the weight of our day-to-day responsibilities is enough, never mind the mass of a galaxy. But Eadie, who has developed her own statistical model for calculating the weight of the Milky Way Galaxy, finds reassurance from studying the ever-expanding universe as it reminds her of the relativity of our issues in the grand scheme of the solar system, and beyond.

Even with all of this, competitive figure skating is still part of her life.

“It’s something I love and it’s completely different from work—it gets me out of the office and it gets me socializing with a whole different set of people, so it just keeps me really happy to keep doing it.”

The figure skating team consists mostly of undergraduate students so Eadie is also seen as a role model within the team. Sometimes, she offers her teammates free physics tutoring in her downtime. Eadie wants women to break down barriers in academia and beyond, believing in the importance of role models. When asked to name her role models, she lists her mom first and foremost.

“I think seeing [my mom] growing up really broke down those walls. Why can’t I go into science and do astronomy? There’s no reason why I can’t.”

Motivation can be hard to tap into when stress kicks in, but Eadie believes it is important to keep devoting time to our passions.

“Don’t stop the things you love doing… It’s a part of who you are and it’s good for you.”

Photo Credit: Aaron Springford

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