Dr. Rhodri Evans BSc, FRCS, FRAS, PhD

 

I have had a passion for astronomy since the age of ten, when I did a Primary School project on the Solar System. As a teenager I combined my passion for astronomy with a parallel passion for photography, taking many photographs of planets and gas clouds through a friend's 8-inch telescope. I studied Physics at Imperial College London, where I obtained a 1st Class Honours degree. I then did my PhD in astrophysics at Cardiff University, where I studied the amount and extent of interstellar dust in normal spiral galaxies. Upon completing my PhD I went to lecture in the United States, where I spent nine years including six at the University of Chicago. It was whilst there that I became involved in airborne astronomy research, making observations from high in the stratosphere to get above the water vapour in the lower atmosphere. I am on the only UK astronomer involved in NASA's Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), and I am part of a team building a far infrared camera for SOFIA. I returned to work in Cardiff in 2001, and I lecture in astrophysics, physics and maths. I am also a frequent contributor on astronomy and physics to radio and TV. I have been on the BBC and ITV in the United Kingdom, and CBS, ABC and PBS in the United States. I have given talks at conferences and astronomical societies around the World. I have a wide range of interests outside of astrophysics; including science in general, music, sport, running, photography, movies, reading and politics. I share some of these on my blog at http://thecuriousastronomer.wordpress.com which I try to update four to five times a week if time allows.

 

TITLES:

 

1. The Northern Lights

2. The search for life elsewhere in our Solar System

3. The search for other Earth-like planets

4. "Cosmic inflation" - The very earliest moments of the Universe

5. Is there life on Mars?

6. Venus - from heaven to hell

7. Captain Cook, Guillaume le Gentil and measuring the Solar System

8. Pickering's Harem - the women who changed our understanding of stars

9. Astronomy from a Boeing 747, why and how?

10. Will an asteroid wipe us out?

11. Yerkes Observatory - the birthplace of modern astronomy

12. George Ellery Hale - the greatest astronomer of the 20th Century