About Me
Short bio:
After completing my undergraduate degree in Physics with Astrophysics at the University of Kent in Canterbury, I embarked on a DPhil at the University of Sussex and the Royal Greenwich Observatory (RGO), the latter situated near the sleepy village of Herstmonceux in East Sussex. At RGO, I worked with Max Pettini and Michael Penston on my thesis, using data from the Isaac Newton Group of telescopes on La Palma, where I learned about the intricacies of photon counting detectors, and some new-fangled electronic devices called "CCDs". I spent the middle year of my PhD at the Anglo Australian Observatory in Sydney, Australia, collecting spectra from the AAT to add to my thesis work, and learning how to enjoy Christmas by the edge of a swimming pool. When the RGO moved to Cambridge, I returned to the UK and completed my PhD at the Institute of Astronomy (IoA) in Cambridge.
After an additional year as a Research Astronomer at RGO, I took up a 2-year European Space Agency (ESA) Fellowship, and moved to the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, where Chris Blades and I worked on what was then new and unique UV data coming from the spectrographs on-board the recently launched Hubble Space Telescope (HST). I remained at STScI for a further two years, where I led a number of programs combining data from HST with ground-based observations I made at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), Kitt Peak and CTIO National Observatories, and Lick Observatory in California.
In 1996 I again returned to the UK to take-up the position of Observatory Research Fellow at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh (ROE) in Scotland. I continued my interest in Space Science, again melding data I obtained from HST with observations made at the ING telescopes on La Palma, and at the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) on Hawaii. When both Royal Observatories were closed in 1999, I moved to Princeton University in New Jersey, as a Staff Researcher. There, I worked with Ed Jenkins and Todd Tripp on various programs; in particular, I led the completion of a Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) Team-project to characterize hot gas in the disk of the Milky Way. In 2005 I was promoted to Staff Astronomer in the department, where I have continued to pursue programs designed to understand the nature of gas in and around galaxies in the Universe, using space- and ground-based observatories, and, more recently, the vast amount of data collected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).
Personal interests:
Audiophilia (because vinyl still sounds better than digital); many things musical; spending too much time at the Edinburgh Festival; the history of ideas.