A short bio of my most notable contributions

I am  an observational astronomer specializing in the study of cosmology, high-redshift galaxies, galaxy formation & evolution and the development of novel astronomical instrumentation. I am best known for working on leading-edge surveys to study distant galaxies and their evolution over cosmic time. My thesis work (1992) was on one of the very first large area near-infrared galaxy imaging surveys, From 1993-1995 I worked primarily on the LDSS2 Redshift Survey, extending the boundaries of normal galaxy surveys back to z=1 (8 billion years ago). With Hubble Space Telescope my collaborators and I resolved the famous ‘faint blue galaxy’ problem, and showed that these were not regular galaxies but a rapidly evolving population of irregular dwarf galaxies and mergers. These works contributed to our modern picture of galaxy evolution over the last 8 billion years, in which large galaxies are not evolving rapidly, and where most of the evolution is happening in smaller galaxies.

During the period 1996-1998 while working at the Anglo-Australian Observatory I was a commissioning and  instrument scientist for the world renowned Two Degree Field Spectrograph (2dF) which made the largest and most precise map ever of the local cosmic structure (the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey) and later working with Ivan Baldry we developed novel methods for measuring the star-formation history of the Universe from the fossil starlight of the galaxies surveyed. We became somewhat infamous for measuring ‘The Colour of the Universe’ from the more serious ‘Cosmic Spectrum.’

While at the AAO working with Joss Hawthorn we developed the ‘nod and shuffle’ observing technique for multi-object spectroscopy, permitting much deeper observations on large telescopes. When I joined the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (2000-2006) I directed the scientific commissioning of nod & shuffle on the Gemini telescopes and as (co-)Principal Investigator of the ‘Gemini Deep Deep Survey’ we used this technique to measure the first spectra of massive red galaxies out to z=2 (10 billion years ago). These new observations showed, contrary to theoretical expectations of the time, that massive galaxies were already largely in place. I have also been involved more recently in leading the GLARE project which has taken spectra of z=6 galaxies as faint as 28th magnitude with the Gemini telescopes.

I am also well-known for being one of the first to propose (with Chris Blake) the ‘Baryon Acoustic Oscillation method’ (a.k.a. ‘Cosmic Sound’) as a new and precise probe of dark energy and am jointly leading an ambitious survey in Australia,’WiggleZ’, to make the first high-redshift detection of this phenomenon and test the modern accelerating universe paradigm.

Finally I am known for creating the first version of the freeware Perl Data Language (PDL) a versatile system for high-level processing and analysis of scientific data. I still use this every day for my work.