Roger Davies

Partner Investigator

University of Oxford

Biography

Roger Davies is the Philip Wetton Professor and Director of the Hintze Centre for Astrophysical Surveys at the University of Oxford. I grew up in North Lincolnshire attending the John Leggott School and going on to read Physics at University College London. I started research working on galaxy dynamics in Cambridge in the 1970s after which I moved to California before spending 6 years on the staff of the US National Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. As part of the ``7 Samurai'' team I worked out a new way of measuring the distances to galaxies and discovered the ``Great Attractor'', a huge concentration of galaxy clusters in the southern sky. I first moved to Oxford in 1988 to lead the UK's participation in the construction of the 8m Gemini telescopes, in Hawaii and Chile. In 1994 I took up the post of Professor of Astronomy at Durham University returning to Oxford in 2002 to be the first holder of the Wetton Chair. I was Chairman of the Physics Department from 2005-10 & Head of Astrophysics from 2011-14. I am the founding Director of the Hintze Centre for Astrophysical Surveys and was elected President of the European Astronomical Society in 2017. My research interests centre on cosmology and how galaxies form and evolve. I have has observed at many of the world’s leading observatories including those in the Canary Islands, Hawaii, Chile, Australia and the United States. I have a longstanding interest in astronomical instruments & telescopes. In recent years I pioneered the use of a new class of astronomical spectrograph to measure the masses and ages of galaxies, as well as search for black holes in their nuclei.