Director of the Space Technology and Industry Institute and Professor @ Swinburne University.

I’m a professional astrophysicist creating universes on supercomputers to understand how galaxies form and to probe the nature of dark matter. I often then get to explain it to as wide an audience as possible on TV / radio or public events.

Currently I am at the Centre for Astrophysics and Computing at Swinburne University. Before then I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Melbourne, and a postdoctoral research associate with ICRAR at the University of Western Australia. Prior to all this antipodean fun I obtained my PhD from the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics and spent a year or two as a postgraduate at the Sterrewacht, Leiden Observatory in The Netherlands.

I am a member of SABRE, the world’s first dark matter detector in the Southern Hemisphere, based at the bottom of a gold mine at SUPL (Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory) in Victoria, Australia.

Previously, I have been two leading surveys on the next-generation Australia Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder telescope which I supported by creating local universe simulations that can be used to test galaxy formation and dark matter theories when compared with the observations from the WALLABY and DINGO surveys. These simulations inspired the DARK move in which I stared, that has since toured to 148 planetariums around the world.