Biosketch

Richard Ellis is Professor of Astrophysics at University College London. He is an observational cosmologist recognised for his contributions to large scale structure, galaxy evolution and astronomical instrumentation. Ellis was born in North Wales and decided to pursue astronomy at the age of six. He received his B.Sc. at UCL in 1971 and a Ph.D. at Oxford in 1974. He spent 19 years at Durham University establishing a major group in extragalactic observations and associated instrumentation. He moved to Cambridge in 1993 as the Plumian Professor and served as Director of the Institute of Astronomy. There he exploited data from the Hubble Space Telescope demonstrating its capabilities in studies of gravitational lensing. He also played a founding role in a team that used distant supernovae to discover the cosmic expansion is accelerating. In 1999 he moved to Caltech as the Steele Professor of Astronomy and served as Director of the Palomar Observatory where he helped establish the international partnership for the Thirty Meter Telescope. After two years as Senior Scientist at the European Southern Observatory, he returned to UCL in 2017. Recently Ellis has pioneered observations of distant galaxies pushing the frontier to when they first formed. He received the Gruber Cosmology Prize in 2023 for his studies of galactic evolution and his role in designing innovative instruments. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Australian Academy of Science and was given the title Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth for his contributions to international science.

Research Interests

Richard Ellis is primarily interested in observations of galaxies as probes of cosmology and cosmic evolution. His largest effort has been in undertaking progressively fainter and larger surveys with successively more powerful instruments, using both ground and space-based facilities. He has been active in promoting, designing and overseeing the construction and exploitation of several new spectroscopic facilities for this purpose. The fundamental goal is to trace the story of galaxy evolution from “cosmic dawn” when the first stellar systems formed, through their role in ionising the tenuous gas in intergalactic space, to understanding the various physical processes that shaped the distinct kinematic and structural morphologies of spiral and elliptical galaxies seen in the local universe. As the visible fabric of the universe, galaxies are also valuable tracers of large scale structure both through their 3-D distribution and as background sources whose distorted shapes can be used infer the evolving distribution of the foreground dark matter through the powerful technique of gravitational lensing. Most recently Ellis has been exploiting the James Webb Space Telescope which has the ability to measure the chemical composition of interstellar gas in very distant galaxies and hence may be ultimately be able to identify chemically-pristene primordial galaxies emerging from darkness.

Membership Type

International Member

Election Year

2024

Primary Section

Section 12: Astronomy