'I've always been fascinated by the sky'

Growing up in small-town Quebec in the 1960s and '70s, the fifth of six children born to a school principal and his homemaker wife, René Doyon had a solitary pastime: he'd skygaze. The play of sun and clouds in daylight and of the moon and the stars at night would entertain young René for hours, and over the years the boy's hobby would develop into a professional passion: astronomy.

"I've always been fascinated by the sky," said Doyon, an Université de Montréal physics professor, head of the Mont-Mégantic Observatory and the Trottier Research Institute on Exoplanets (IREx), a project scientist with the Canadian Space Agency and NASA, and a world-renowned expert on astronomical instrumentation.

Before all those titles - and long before the honour being bestowed on him today, the 2025 Killam Prize in Natural Sciences - there were his formative years in Thetford Mines. Back then, the city was known as the asbestos capital of the world, home to an assortment of future hockey players, artists and singers, journalists and politicians who, like him, would someday make their mark.

If for them the sky was the limit, for Doyon it was just the beginning.

"Thetford Mines is a small city, so you can really see the sky at night, and I remember one winter outside our house there were all these drapes in the sky: it was an aurora borealis, the Northern Lights," he recalled. "Fascinating! So much so, that I saved up and bought myself a Tasco telescope and became an amateur astronomer. I'd go outside and watch the planets and see what I could discover."

After high school, a philosophy professor got Doyon hooked on the idea that the mysteries of the universe could be penetrated through the mathematics used in physics. He learned he could follow in the tradition of Newton and Einstein and probe the meaning of life through scientific enquiry and - who knows - maybe find the keys to existence beyond Earth.

A pathway to the stars

In higher education, he found a path out of his hometown.

"By cégep, I knew that my thing was going to be astronomy," Doyon said. "It was really a gift: to know so early what you want to do. Then in Montreal, at UdeM, I started studying physics. I worked hard, got my first grades, which were very good, and said to myself 'OK, I know I can really do this.' And I never looked back, only forward."

Today he joins four Canadian scholars in the humanities, social sciences, health sciences and engineering receiving $100,000 Killam Prizes from the philanthropic organization The Killam Trusts. Previous winners at UdeM include artificial-intelligence pioneer Yoshua Bengio and quantum physicist Gilles Brassard. The 2025 prizes will be given at a ceremony in November at Toronto's Massey College.

At UdeM, Doyon's trajectory began in the early 1980s on the cusp of a game-changing development in stargazing: digital technology.

"Before, astronomy was done with photographic plates," he recalled. "Electronic detectors replaced all that, and because they were an order of magnitude more sensitive, they really revolutionized optical astronomy. But infra-red astronomy, which I was getting into, was a totally different game, and it was only starting at that point - in Quebec, at UdeM and Mont-Mégantic."

Supervised by physics professor Daniel Nadeau, Doyon did a research internship in infra-red instrumentation at the Eastern Townships observatory, then pursued his interest under Nadeau as a master's student. Along the way, Doyon had become involved with a fellow physics student, Nicole St-Louis, and as a couple they started looking at places abroad to do their PhDs together.

That turned out to be London, England. From 1988 to 1990 - at a time of another revolution, this time political, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War - Doyon studied infra-red extragalactic astronomy (looking beyond the Milky Way) at Imperial College of London, and St-Louis studied ultraviolet astronomy (looking at massive stars) at University College London.

Touring the world’s observatories

Doyon's work in those two years took him to observatories around the world - in in South Africa, in Australia and in Hawaii, "where the sky is so beautiful." He got better at infra-red astronomy, and in 1991 he and St-Louis returned to Montreal.

They began as post-doctoral researchers at UdeM. Three years later, under a highly competitive federal sciences program to boost the presence of women in Canada's universities, St-Louis was hired as a bursaried professor. Doyon stayed on as a research associate with his mentor, Nadeau, and at Mont-Mégantic went on to help develop MONICA (MONtreal Infrared CAmera), a first such instrument in Canadian technology.

Other instruments for other telescopes followed, and with demand high for the new devices, "I found myself getting into the business of essentially generating my own salary by meeting the demand," he recalled. "It was a very unusual path in academia, staying a research associate and eventually having students work for me without actually being a professor myself."

Doyon would have to wait a good decade-and-half - until 2007 - to land a professorship at UdeM. In that time, after other astronomers using indirect measurement techniques detected the first "exoplanets" (planets outside the Solar System) in the early and mid-1990s, Doyon decided to shift his research focus to this new field.

"The first discovery of an exoplanet was in 1995 - and that was the trigger for me to completely change my field of research," he said.

"I started to dream about being able to take pictures of exoplanets," he said. And that meant starting a program of high-contrast infrared imaging in the physics department with my mentors Daniel Nadeau and René Racine, then director of the Mont-Mégantic Observatory, co-supervising students to help with the research and planning the next steps."

A big break

Doyon's big break came in November 2001.

"I got a call from (astronomer) Marcia Rieke at the University of Arizona telling me they were developing an infrared camera for the Next Generation Space Telescope, which turned out to be the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). She wanted me to join her team and build some components for her instrument. I said, 'Sure, I have the experience, but I've never made one for use in space.'

"She said, 'Don't worry.' I said, 'But when does the telescope launch? She said, 'Well, 2008.' I said, 'Wow, that's a long way away,' not knowing it would take much longer, to 2021! But I said, 'OK, let's do it.' And that's how I became actively involved in JWST" - an involvement that continues to this day.

At the Canadian Space Agency, NRC veteran astronomer John Hutchings led the design of a fine guidance sensor (FGS) system for the telescope to precisely pinpoint objects in space, and tasked Doyon with designing its scientific module: the tunable filter imager (TFI). Attached to the FGS, it would, among other things, capture pictures and spectroscopic data of nearby exoplanets, brown dwarfs and stars.

Such important work also led to Doyon getting promoted at UdeM - to professor, in 2007.

"Being a professor gave me access to many things I didn't have before, especially grants, he said. "And that's the first thing I did - apply for them, many of them - and I was very successful. I was able to divide myself into two parallel lives: my Webb life and my life trying to build sophisticated instruments for use here on Earth."

An unexpected honour

No stranger to prizes - in 2023 NASA awarded him its Medal for Exceptional Public Service, topping several other honours in Quebec and Canada - Doyon was nevertheless surprised when told he'd be getting the Killam. It’s given annually to “active Canadian scholars who have distinguished themselves through sustained research excellence, making a significant impact in their fields.”

At UdeM, Brassard won a Killam in 2011 and Bengio in 2019 – both, like Doyon, in the natural sciences category.

"I thought 'Wow, I don't consider myself in the same league as these guys," Doyon said. "But it's not only a recognition of the work that I've done and its impact, it's recognition of the work of my team. I didn't do it alone."

There were hurdles along the way - major ones. Designs of the TFI on JWST that had been worked on for almost a decade ultimately proved very difficult, and for two years Doyon and his team worked hard to come up with a new instrument with new capabilities, in particular for studying exoplanet atmospheres.

When, in June 2011, he presented the revamped version - called the Near-Infared and Imager Slitless Spectrogaph (NIRISS) - to the working group that guides the JWST’s scientific objectives, he feared his program would be cancelled.

“I surprised them with the new plan, presented it for an hour-and-a-half, and in the end it was put to a vote - the first time they'd ever had to vote on something - and we came through. It turned out to be an opportunity for everyone. NIRISS was superior to the previous instrument and could be used to observe exoplanet atmospheres and much more, and that's why it ultimately became a key instrument on Webb."

Bringing researchers together

Along the way, Doyon pursued another objective: bringing exoplanet researchers together from other Quebec universities. And so, in 2014, iREx was born, and eight years later added Trottier to its name following a $10-million donation over 10 years from Montreal computer graphics executive and space buff Lorne Trottier. Based at UdeM's MIL campus, the institute coordinates the work of 60 scientists from UdeM, McGill, Laval, Bishop's and Espace pour la vie Montréal.

"Our purpose is to do research, our vision is to explore new worlds and find life elsewhere in the universe, but it's also important that we reach out and share our scientific endeavour with the public, from adults to little kids," Doyon said.

A father himself - now divorced, he and St-Louis have two sons and a daughter, the latter of whom studies physical engineering at École Polytechnique, UdeM's affiliated school - Doyon knows that as he enters his 63rd year he needs to now concentrate on what more he can contribute over the next decade, likely the last of his professional life.

Between spending his downtime doing handiwork at the cottage, catching up on his reading (these days, it’s Quebec political scientist Francis Dupuis Déri's L'anarchisme expliqué à mon père, and psychologist Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow), playing tennis, cheering on the Montreal Canadiens, and attending the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, Doyon still has his eyes on the sky.

"My dream is to find life - I'm convinced there's life somewhere else," he said. "It's probably not going to be me that finds it, and of course it's not going to be a single person; it'll be a team, hopefully including people from iREx.

"With Webb we'll be able to detect atmospheres around temperate exoplanets. The next big step will be the Extremely Large Telescope, in Chile, for which we and colleagues in Europe are developing an instrument to see if the closest habitable world, four light years away from Earth, has biosignatures in its atmosphere. We'll know that within a decade.

"But that's my problem, in a way. To quote (the late Canadian astrophysicist) Hubert Reeves: Je n'aurai pas le temps. Try as I might, I simply won't have the time to do everything I'd like to do and discover everything I'd like to discover."

Today's climate of uncertainty

One new hurdle these days is the second U.S. presidency of Donald Trump. With funding for the sciences being cut, programs cancelled and top researchers like NASA's chief scientist and others at the agency fired for politically partisan reasons, the general climate of uncertainty is not particularly conducive to long-term international collaborations with the U.S.

Doyon is trying hard to remain optimistic.

"The signs are very disturbing - it's very concerning to me. As scientists, we're trying to stay above the political fray, but to be honest it's very difficult, because it's all intertwined.

"Every day comes another surprise from south of the border."

For someone who's spent his life looking up at the skies, it's dismaying that the news down here on Earth these days is so bad.

"What's saved us in the past, what's made us succeed and be strong scientifically, is that we had a close working relationship," said Doyon.

"The U.S., Canada and Europe have made James Webb their common project - it's arguably the most complex machine ever built. The economic war now being waged is the antithesis of the good collaborative spirit that made Webb such a successful project. For the economy and for science, isolation and confrontation is not the way to go.

"Hopefully, like the pandemic, all this will soon be just a bad dream."