One of the main goals of the BVEX project is to give students experience building radio telescopes and also designing experiments for the "space-like" environment of the stratosphere.
BVEX is designed, built and operated by students from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario in Canada.
The BVEX Team
The 2025 BVEX launch team at the CSA's Timmins, ON Stratospheric Balloon Base. From left to right Felix Thiel, Terry Yang, Mayukh Bagchi, Aarchi Shah, Stephanie St-Jean, Rafael Costa, Laura Fissel (missing from the photo: Maggie Oxford)
Felix Thiel, Queen's University
Principal Investigator:
- Laura Fissel
Graduate Student Researchers:
- Mayukh Bagchi (PhD, MSc)
- Felix Thiel (PhD, MSc)
- Maggie Oxford (MSc)
Undergraduate Student Researchers:
- 2024-2025:
- Rafael Costa (SWEP)
- Aarchi Shah (Accelerated MSc)
- Stephanie St-Jean (NSERC-USRA)
- Terry Yang (SWEP)
- Oliver Dantzer (Research Assistant)
- 2023-2024:
- Peter Simpson (SWEP)
- Amna Husnain (SWEP)
- Jade Yeung (Physics Honour's Thesis)
- Bonnie Slocombe (Physics Honour's Thesis)
- Willson Bonney (Physics Honour's Thesis)
- Jake Devlin (EngPhys Senior Design Thesis)
- 2022-2023:
- Bonnie Slocombe (SWEP)
- Thomas Emo (SWEP)
- Jess Lo (Research Assistant)
- Alex Chase (EngPhys Senior Design Thesis)
- 2022:
- Emily Butler (EngPhys Senior Design Thesis)
- Jess Lo (Research Assistant)
Team Members from Outside Queen's:
The BVEX team is also advised by our team members from outside Queen's University who are experts in radio technology, VLBI, supermassive black holes, and building stratospheric balloon-borne experiments.
- Dr. Lindy Blackburn (Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory)
- Dr. Vincent Fish (MIT Haystack)
- Prof. Daryl Haggard (McGill University)
- Dr. Michael Johnson (Harvard CfA)
- Ganesh Rajagopalan (MIT Haystack)
- Dr. Javier Romualdez (StarSpec Technologies, Inc.)
- Dr. Adrian Sinclair (NASA Goddard)
Funding and Acknowledgements
BVEX is funded by the Canadian Space Agency's Flights and Fieldwork for the Advancement of Science and Technology (FAST) 2021 Funding Initiative, with lab infrastructure used in the project funded by the Queen's Faculty of Arts Infrastructure Fund, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation's John R. Evans Leaders Fund (JELF).
We also gratefully acknowledge support with simultaneous ground-based observations from the Haystack Observatory, the Very Large Baseline Array of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and Radio Telescope Effelsberg.