23/June/2015 We are delighted that Professor Matthew Bailes, leader of the UTMOST project, has been awarded a Laureate Fellowship by the Australian Research Council for research into Fast Radio Bursts, pulsar physics and the search for gravitational waves.

Laureate Fellowships are amongst the most prestigious in Australian research. Fifteen were awarded by the ARC in 2015.

The announcement was made today by the Minister for Education and Training, the Hon Christopher Pyne MP, who highlighted that competition has been particular high this year.

Quoting from the press release :

This fellowship … aims to develop and deploy a generic supercomputing solution for the powerful square kilometre array precursor telescopes in Australia and South Africa. ‘Fast radio bursts’ are a new astronomical phenomenon of as yet unknown origin, with enormous potential to probe the cosmos in new ways — but only a handful are known. Concurrently, advances in computer graphics have enabled very low-cost parallel processors to be constructed that are revolutionising radio astronomy signal processing. The telescopes in Australia and South Africa will be used to discover new fast radio bursts, and will also be pursuing a pulsar timing program which seeks to probe the interior of neutron stars, search for gravitational waves and make new tests of general relativity.

Congratulations Matthew for this wonderful achievement!