I’m an astronomer who grew up inspired by viewing the night sky through a small telescope. These days, I use data from some of the largest surveys around to try and understand how galaxies form and evolve. My most recent work includes efforts to understand what stops a galaxy forming stars, and to understand how spectacular mergers between galaxies such as that due to occur between our own Milky Way and Andromeda in a few billion years' time contribute to the growth of supermassive black holes. Because these projects often involve more information than can possibly be filtered by professional astronomers (and our algorithms), I have for the last ten years let the Galaxy Zoo and Zooniverse projects, which engage more than a million ‘citizen scientists’ in tasks such as sorting galaxies by shape, discovering planets and even counting penguins. Contributions from anyone and everyone are welcome at Zooniverse.org. Zooniverse is a key part of plans for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) project, now under construction in Chile, which will produce 30TB of data a night and provide a movie of the changing night sky.
Away from astronomy, my main interest is in real tennis, played to a pretty average standard on the ancient court in Merton Street.
A list of publications can be found here:
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