Profile
Astrophysicist and research leader with twenty years of experience extracting scientific discovery from large space-mission archives — Kepler, K2, JWST, and Canada's NEOSSat, Pandora, and Roman contributions. Combines a deep research record in statistical and computational methods for massive time-series datasets with recent senior administrative experience: department chair, budget and personnel management, government contract oversight, and government-facing science-policy leadership for the Canadian astronomical community. Author or co-author of 410+ refereed papers (H-index 92, ~32,000 citations).
Education
Thesis: An Upper Limit on the Albedo of HD 209458b: Direct Imaging Photometry with the MOST Satellite. Advisor: Jaymie Matthews.
Thesis: The Nature of M33's AGB Stars. Advisor: Harvey Richer.
Thesis: CCD Observations of RR Lyrae Variables in Globular Clusters. Advisor: Christine Clement.
Academic Appointments
Data-reduction pipeline development for the CSA-built NIRISS instrument.
Kepler Mission transit scientist; validation of 800+ transiting exoplanets.
Leadership & Administration
Managed the department's full operating budget — salaries for full-time and part-time faculty, professional-development funds, and lab/equipment procurement — while overseeing ~20 courses annually to ~200 undergraduate and graduate students. Restructured graduate course offerings, increasing tuition revenue and eliminating ad hoc one-on-one graduate teaching. Reorganized upper-year course scheduling onto a two-year rotation, cutting course-preparation costs while keeping students on track to graduate on time. Corrected a provincial compensation misclassification undervaluing departmental course offerings.
Drafted government funding-priority recommendations and authored public biannual reports on the state of Canadian space astronomy.
Led the exoplanets topical team and authored Section 4 (Exoplanets) of this CSA community-priorities report, produced by 400+ experts from 35 organizations.
Advises the federal government on Canada's $200M investment in the Thirty Meter Telescope; liaises with project leadership, government, and Native Hawaiian community representatives.
Represents Bishop's University on a board of VPs of Research, university presidents, and industry representatives lobbying for federal funding of large-scale Canadian astronomy projects (e.g., SKA, CASTOR).
Negotiated a new collective-bargaining-agreement provision protecting full-time faculty research time against teaching load, ratified by both the faculty union and the university. Built full costing models balancing teaching load and relief against research programs, overheads, and infrastructure.
Bishop's University Research Space Committee — audited and evaluated campus research-space needs.
Bishop's University Faculty Council Appeals Committee (two terms).
Bishop's University Prizes Committee.
Directly supervises project managers on the POET, Pandora, and Roman efforts across Bishop's and partner institutions.
Space Mission Leadership
Principal Investigator — Canadian smallsat exoplanet telescope; directed a $1.2M CAD payload-concept and prototyping contract with PSPC / the CSA Space Technology Development Program — the largest government contract held by Bishop's University — spanning Bishop's, Western University, and industry partners ABB and SFL.
Co-Investigator, international Community program Transiting Planets in the Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey (PI R. Wilson, Univ. of Maryland; Co-Is from STScI, NASA Goddard, JPL, Caltech/IPAC), valued at $1.2M USD. Lead the Canadian team's contribution and am adapting the bls_cuda GPU-accelerated detection framework as its core transit-search code for a survey expected to discover up to 100,000 new exoplanets.
Co-Investigator, supported by a CSA ROSS grant (2023–2026, renewed 2026–2028); run the mission's Auxiliary Science Program — community target selection, stellar characterization, and target-list curation.
Exoplanet Science Lead — developed the mission's exoplanet science case, produced exoplanet-driven mission requirements, and conducted detector testing.
Guaranteed Time Observations (GTO) team member.
NIRISS instrument team — data-reduction pipeline and simulation software development (2015–2017); ongoing NIRISS science team member.
Science team; software development; joint mission with Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC).
Science Office; Participating Scientist; led recomputation of the DR25 planet catalog (updated Gaia-based stellar parameters, new Bayesian false-positive framework).
Science team member.
Risk, Compliance & Contract Management
As PI of the $1.2M CAD POET payload contract — Bishop's University's largest-ever government contract — held full responsibility for PSPC/CSA compliance: milestone-gated Performance Evaluation Criteria (PEC) reviews, Technology Readiness Level (TRL) advancement and reporting, work-breakdown-structure and financial/accounting reporting, and disclosure of Background and Foreground Intellectual Property (BIP/FIP).
When a COVID-era global parts shortage put procurement of long-lead optical components at risk of breaching budget and schedule, descoped detector-electronics breadboarding to an on-paper design study, preserving funding to complete full Optical Telescope Assembly (OTA) testing on time and on budget. The resulting OTA design was subsequently commercialized and adopted for reuse on another Canadian space mission.
Led Bishop's University's first-ever enrollment in Canada's Controlled Goods Program and developed the university's first campus security plan, both required for NEOSSat, a joint mission with DRDC.
Research Funding
Canada Research Chair, Exoplanet Astrophysics — $500K CAD
NSERC Discovery Grant: A New Era of Exoplanet Astrophysics — $160K CAD
CSA Space Technology Development Program: POET payload concept — $1.2M CAD (with industry & university partners)
CSA ROSS Program: Pandora Mission Co-Investigator — $150K CAD (2023–2026, renewed 2026–2028)
CFI John R. Evans Leaders Fund: The Discovery and Characterization of One Hundred Thousand Transiting Exoplanets — $29,076 CAD (plus matching provincial funds); GPU compute nodes for Roman transit-search work
Digital Research Alliance of Canada, Resources for Research Groups (Fast-Track #3300): Discovery and Characterization of Extrasolar Planets — 2,408 core-years (rorqual-compute) and 100 TB storage, valued at ~$270K CAD
NSERC Discovery Grant: Determining What Makes a Planet Earth-like — $125K CAD
CFI Grant: Determining What Makes a Planet Earth-like — $400K CAD
CSA Science Maturation Study: Photometric Observations of Transiting Extrasolar Planets — $150K CAD
FQRNT New University Researchers Startup Program — $40K CAD
FQRNT Regroupement Stratégique: Centre de Recherche en Astrophysique du Québec (CRAQ)
Data Science, Software & Technical Skills
Python (NumPy, SciPy, Astropy), C, Fortran (77/90+), Verilog
MCMC, Gaussian processes, nested sampling, and Bayesian inference for demographic-scale exoplanet population studies
Kepler/K2 transit-search and light-curve validation codes (community standard, used in the DR25 catalog); ATOCA algorithm contributions for JWST NIRISS SOSS spectral extraction; TESS vetting tools
Large-scale reanalysis and reprocessing of mission catalogs (Kepler DR25); design of ML/statistical classification frameworks for petabyte-scale transit surveys (Roman)
Personally administer on-campus research computing: Proxmox virtualization cluster, pfSense firewall, TrueNAS backup/NFS storage, a JupyterHub server, and a GPU server for CUDA benchmarking; hold a Digital Research Alliance of Canada allocation of 2,408 core-years and 100 TB storage.
Key Research Software (Open Source)
GPU-accelerated Box-Least-Squares transit-search code; forms the core detection and characterization framework being adopted for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's search for up to 100,000 new exoplanets.
Transit-modeling and light-curve validation codebase used to construct and vet NASA's DR25 Kepler planet candidate catalog, the community standard for exoplanet demographics.
Photometric data-reduction pipeline developed to demonstrate and enable astrophysical science with Canada's NEOSSat satellite.
Photometric reduction pipeline for Canada's MOST space telescope, used for early-career exoplanet and asteroseismology research.
github.com/jasonfrowe — 12+ additional public repositories, including Kepler_TTV, autotransit, poet, and JWST/NIRISS data-reduction tools (e.g. ATOCA).
Teaching & Mentorship
PHY325 Computational Physics (Python-based numerical methods); PHY487/587 Exoplanet Astrophysics (cross-listed undergraduate/graduate)
PHY113 Introduction to Astronomy; PHY214 Astrophysics; PHY580/581 Graduate Seminar (revamped curriculum and grading, pro bono, 2020–present)
Redesigned course assessment to preserve academic integrity in the LLM era, shifting weight toward term projects, constrained problem design, and in-class evaluation
Supervises undergraduate, graduate (M.Sc./Ph.D.), and postdoctoral trainees; several have led first-author publications from JWST and Kepler data (D. Lizotte, J. Sikora, M. Matesic). Regularly hosts USRA and Trottier/iREx summer interns and mentors Cégep students through the Cheminement recherche-études program.
Selected Publications
410+ refereed publications; H-index = 92; ~32,000 citations; consistently ranked among the top-10 most-cited astrophysicists in Canada and top-100 internationally (source: ADS/Google Scholar).
Selected recent and landmark papers
Full publication list available at NASA ADS.
Selected Invited Talks
Covered the Kepler-to-Roman transit-search heritage and ongoing TESS work; data pre-conditioning and volume handling for Roman-scale archives; cloud vs. university research-computing tradeoffs for peta-scale data; community software; and underlying detection-statistics theory.
Used the Pandora and POET smallsat missions as case studies of the space-telescope development lifecycle, with a focus on interdisciplinary collaboration, engineering problem-solving, and project management.
Awards & Honors
NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal (twice-awarded)
Emerging Scholar Award, Bishop's University
Canada Research Chair, Tier 2 (awarded 2017; renewed 2023)
Minor planet 2007 LP30 named Jasonrowe in recognition of contributions to exoplanet science
Public Engagement & Media
Canada's role in the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, including my group's contribution, covered by La Presse, CBC News, CBC Radio's As It Happens, and The Globe and Mail.
Led press release and data-sonification video for the discovery of the Kepler-385 seven-planet resonance-chain system; coverage by CBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, and The Globe and Mail; 38,000+ YouTube views in the first week.
Regular contributor to national print, radio, and online media on exoplanet science; volunteer instructor for exoplanet mini-courses at universities across Québec.
Professional Service
Referee for Nature, Astrophysical Journal, Astronomical Journal, Astronomy & Astrophysics, MNRAS; as a referee for AAS journals, apply their author and referee LLM-use guidelines in practice.
Annual NASA senior mission/proposal review panels; NSERC and NRC grant review panels; conference SOC member
Canadian Astronomical Society (CASCA); American Astronomical Society (AAS); Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx); AstroQuébec
References
Available upon request.