Prof. Ada Sinclair

Ada Sinclair was born in Victoria, British Columbia, and spent her childhood hiking the trails of Vancouver Island with her parents, a marine biologist and a software engineer. She describes the combination as formative: 'My mother taught me that careful observation is how you understand something. My father taught me that a good model makes the observation useful.' She arrived at the University of Toronto committed to computational physics, left committed to experimental physics, and has spent her career insisting the distinction is mostly artificial.

Her master's thesis involved numerical modeling of fluid dynamics at small scales — work that was technically software engineering as much as physics. It prepared her well for doctoral research at Stanford, where she worked with ultrafast laser systems to probe heat transport in nanoscale films with a precision that required both experimental delicacy and computational analysis to extract meaning from. Her thesis, completed in 2012, produced three papers and a measurement technique now used in three other research groups.

At McGill she built a teaching laboratory that became, over several years, a kind of model for hands-on undergraduate instruction. She redesigned the second-year lab curriculum from scratch, replacing prescriptive cook-book experiments with open-ended investigations where students design their own protocols and analyze their own sources of uncertainty. The redesign won a university-level curriculum innovation award in 2016. The lab notes she wrote for the course are freely available on her faculty website and have been downloaded by instructors at institutions across four continents.

In 2017 she co-founded PhysicsLab.io, an open-source platform for browser-based physics simulations, with two former graduate students. The platform now hosts simulations used by over six hundred high schools and universities, and her co-founders have spun it into a nonprofit. She remains an active contributor and serves on the steering committee.

Sinclair is an experienced backcountry skier who spends a portion of each winter in the Laurentians and the Rockies, and a woodworker who builds furniture in a small shop she set up in her garage in 2020. She is also learning Mandarin, which she describes as 'the hardest problem I've attempted since my dissertation.' She mentors a significant number of undergraduate researchers, several of whom have continued to PhD programs at leading institutions.