Meet the Instructor

Each issue of the SAO e-zine will feature one of our SAO instructors. This issue we get to know Dr Chris Blake, who is a new Faculty member at Swinburne and will be instructing HET604 in Semester 1, 2007.

Chris spent his formative years in the U.K., receiving an astrophysics Ph.D. from Oxford University. Finally escaping his homeland in 2002, he has since swapped hemispheres every couple of years, working as a researcher in Baltimore, USA, Sydney, Australia, and Vancouver, Canada. In August 2006, he returned Down Under to join the growing astrophysics team at Swinburne University. He is still working on his Aussie accent...

Chris's main research goal is to measure the properties of the mysterious "dark energy", which is forcing the current expansion of the Universe to accelerate. He is part of a small team of Aussie astronomers who were recently awarded 200 nights of time on the Anglo-Australian Telescope in New South Wales, to measure the distances to half a million faint galaxies and create the largest map of the cosmos. This should keep him quite busy for the next three years! To follow-up on some of Chris's research, see Blake et al. (2006, MNRAS, in press) and Blake & Glazebrook (2003, ApJ, 594, p665).

When not doing astrophysics, Chris plays 5-a-side football, strums the guitar, cycles around Port Phillip Bay, and hikes in the Rocky Mountains (when in the USA). And his favourite colour is green.

Dr Chris Blake