Professor Stephen Smartt appointed Philip Wetton Chair of Astrophysics

Professor Stephen Smartt CBE FRS has been appointed the Philip Wetton Chair of Astrophysics.

Taking over from Professor Roger Davies, who has held the Chair since 2002, Professor Smartt will join Christ Church as a professorial fellow later this year.

The Philip Wetton Chair of Astrophysics was created in 2002 by Philip Wetton to attract a world-class experimental astrophysicist.

Professor Smartt, currently at Queen’s University Belfast, is a world-leading authority on exploding stars and unusual transients in the Universe and runs large sky survey projects to stretch our understanding of how stars die.

He is a pioneer in the field of digital time domain sky surveys and has led several international projects to uncover an unexpected diversity in the physics of stellar death. He discovered some of the Universe’s most luminous supernovae and played a leading role in the discovery and physical understanding of the first electromagnetic counterpart to a gravitational wave source.

He was awarded the Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal in the Physical and Mathematical Sciences in 2018 as well as the Royal Astronomical Society’s George Darwin lectureship. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2020.

Professor Roger Davies will continue his research on galaxy evolution and in his role as President of the European Astronomical Society.

Last year Professor Davies was elected to the Board of Directors of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, AURA. AURA operates several ground-based and space-based observatories including the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore which hosts the mission operations centre for the James Webb Space Telescope.