I am senior researcher in radio astronomy at the University of Oxford, UK, and a visiting professor at Rhodes University, South Africa. I am part of the Breakthough Listen program, and affiliated with the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory. I am also a research associate in astrophysics at Green Templeton College.
A list of my publications can be found on NASA's ADS here.
My research revolves around the use of radio interferometers to study various phenomena in the Universe. I am the technical lead for several next generation, large-scale radio surveys, primarily using MeerKAT, the South African precursor to the mid-frequency component of the Square Kilometre Array. I am interested in novel data processing techniques, and non-standard and challenging observational scenarios. I co-lead the 'fatalii' project, a collaboration between Oxford / Rhodes / Breakthrough Listen, which will deploy high performance, high time cadence, real time imaging systems on MeerKAT and the Allen Telescope Array. The aim of this project is to detect new and rare astrophysical transients and variable sources, classify anomalies in the data to aid false-positive rejection in beamformer SETI observations, and to eventually enable efficient SETI programs using interferometric image-domain data for the first time.
I held a Hintze Fellowship in Oxford prior to my current position (2017-2019). Before that I spent four years in Australia where I was a Senior Research Scientist (2013-2017) and head of the astrophysics group (2016-2017) at CSIRO Astronomy & Space Science (now Space and Astronomy), where I worked mainly on commissioning the ASKAP telescope, the other dish-based SKA precursor instrument. I have also previously held an Honorary Senior Research Associate (2011-2017) position at Rhodes University. Before moving to Australia I was a SEPnet Fellow (2011-2013), and post-doc (2004-2011) at the University of Oxford. I received my PhD in astrophysics from the University of Manchester (2005).
Thanks for visiting.