Meet the Instructor

We continue our series of Meet the Instructors. This edition we meet Prof Warrick Couch who recently joined Swinburne University and will be teaching HET614 in Semester 2, 2007.

Warrick originates from New Zealand, having crossed "the ditch" in the late 1970s to do his PhD at the Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatories of the ANU in Canberra. This was followed by astronomy research positions at Durham University in the UK and at the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Sydney, before taking up a faculty position in the School of Physics at the University of New South Wales. After spending 17 years at UNSW, during which time he rose to the ranks of professor and Head of School, Warrick moved to Swinburne in 2006 to take up a Distinguished Professor position within the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, as part of an exciting new initiative to recruit new research staff.

Warricks main research interests lie in the fields of galaxy evolution and cosmology. He is particularly interested in how galaxies evolve in massive rich clusters, the densest environments which galaxies are know to inha bit. His work involves use of the world's largest ground-based telescopes as well as space telescopes such as Hubble, Chandra and XMM. Warrick is also part of the WiggleZ project which is currently using the unique capabilities of the 2dF/AAOmega wide-field multi-object spectrograph on the AAT to measure redshifts for up to 400,000 high redshift galaxies in an attempt to understand the nature of the mysterious dark energy. To follow-up on some of Warrick's research, see Bekki, Couch, Shioya & Vazdekis (2005) and Pracy, Couch, et al. (2005).

In his spare time, Warrick is an avid sports follower and New Zealand All Blacks supporter, with interests also in music, travel, and the property market.

Prof Warrick Couch