Richard S. Ellis

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.