Meet the people who make up STEM Faculty.
I joined the Open University in 1999 as a Lecturer in Astrophysics, and I am now a Professor of Astronomy.
Previously I held a Temporary Lectureship in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester, and postdoctoral positions at the Max-Planck Institut für Astrophysik (MPA) in Garching and at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
In 1994 I was awarded a Feodor-Lynen Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
For my first degree I studied physics, mathematics and astronomy at the Universität Regensburg, the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München (LMU) and the Universitätssternwarte München. Based at the MPA I obtained my PhD from the LMU in 1992.
My research is in stellar astrophysics, with a particular focus on stellar and binary star populations, transients and exoplanets. I am also interested in robotic astronomy and educational research in physics and astronomy.
I was the Director of Teching of the School of Physical Sciences from 2016-2021, and in this role I was responsible for the maintenance, improvement and further development of the curriculum in physics, astronomy, planetary and space science. I led the creation of the Institute of Physics accredited BSc (Hons) Physics (R51), and set the foundations for the first MPhys by distance learning in the UK (Master of Physics, M06)
I wrote the textbook Extreme Environment Astrophysics (co-published with CUP) which has been used in the module S383 The Energetic Universe, I developed the robotic telescope (PIRATE) strand of the Astrophysical Data Analysis project in S382 Astrophysics, and the colour magnitude diagram astronomy topic in SXPA288 (now SXS288 Remote experiments in physics and space). I contributed to the textbook The Sun and Stars in S282 Astronomy.
I am chairing the production of the module S384 Astrophysics of Stars and Exoplanets, co-authored the textbook Exoplanets and wrote the observational astronomy project. I am also the author of the telescope/exoplanet project model in the MPhys project module (S841).
I am the academic lead of the OpenScience Observatories (OSO), the Astronomy Wing of the OpenSTEM Labs. OSO owns and operates two robotic optical telescopes in Tenerife (PIRATE and COAST), a robotic radio telescope and the George Abell Observatory at the Walton Hall campus.
I was the lead of the Open University element of the UK support for the development phase of the ESA PLATO mission.
