The Petrie Lecture is an invited discourse by an outstanding astrophysicist which is held at Annual Meetings of the Society in alternate (odd-numbered) years, in memory of the significant contributions to astrophysical research by the late Robert M. Petrie. The Petrie Lecture originated under the auspices of the Canadian Committee for the IAU, prior to the existence of the Society, and was revived by the Society in 1977 as a regular event. Nominations for the Petrie Lecture can be made by submitting the name of a nominee to the Awards committee at any time. Nominations for the 2019 Lecturer should be received by December 15 2018.
2017 Petrie Prize Lecture
The 2017 R. M. Petrie Prize is awarded to Dr. Charles Beichman for his incredible career contributions to the study of extrasolar planetary systems.
Dr. Beichman is currently the Executive Director of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech, which is the focus of exoplanet research at NASA. Dr. Beichman’s search for evidence of planetary systems is long-standing, dating back to the first detections of planetary systems with IRAS through the Spitzer Space Telescope and now looking forward to the James Webb Space Telescope. He has published many key papers on Kuiper Belt and Asteroid Belt analogs around other stars and has developed analysis tools that were essential to several breakthrough observational results.
For the past 10 years Dr. Beichman has been closely associated with and helped to formulate NASA’s program to search for planets around other stars, serving as Chair of the Science Working Group for the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) and authoring numerous articles and reports on TPF and the search for terrestrial and ultimately habitable planets. He is also involved in extensive outreach efforts that include appearances on several programs about space.
It is an honour to add Dr. Beichman’s name to the long list of distinguished past Petrie Prize recipients.
| 2017 | Charles Beichman |
From protostars to exoplanets to life on other worlds |
| 2015 |  Wendy Freedman |
Measurement of Cosmological Parameters |
| 2013 |  Françoise Combes |
Molecular gas in galaxies across the Hubble time |
| 2011 | Andrew Fabian | Within one gravitational radius of the event horizon of a black hole |
| 2009 | Scott Tremaine | Stellar dynamics at the centres of galaxies |
| 2007 | Ewine van Dishoeck | Spitzer observations of star- and planet-forming regions from ice cold to steaming hot |
| 2005 | Reinhard Genzel | Massive Black Holes in Galaxies |
| 2003 | Sir Martin Rees | How Did the Cosmic Dark Age End? |
| 2001 | James Gunn | The Sloan Digital Survey |
| 1999 | Sidney van den Bergh | The Local Group of Galaxies |
| 1997 | Alex Filippenko | Supernovae and their Cosmological Implications |
| 1995 | George Herbig | IC 349 – Barbard’s Merope Nebula |
| 1993 | Maarten Schmidt | From Galactic Structure to Quasars |
| 1991 | P. B. Stetson | Progress in CCD Photometry |
| 1989 | P. J. E. Peebles | Tracing the Orbits of Galaxies back in Time |
| 1987 | Henry Matthews | C3H2 – A New Probe of the Interstellar Medium |
| 1985 | Charles Townes | The Galactic Centre |
| 1983 | M. J. Plavec | Strongly Interacting Binary Stars |
| 1981 | Hubert Reeves | La Physique des Premiers Temps de l’Univers |
| 1979 | Geoffrey Burbidge | The Redshift Problem |
| 1977 | J. Beverly Oke | Seyfert Galaxies and Quasars |
| 1971 | Jesse L. Greenstein | Pre-White Dwarf Evolution |
| 1971 | C. S. Beals | Forms of Impact Craters Related to the Thermal History of the Lunar Surface |
| 1970 | A. G. W. Cameron | The Chemical Evolution of the Galaxy |
