Ross Church

At the time of writing I am a Marie Curie research fellow in astronomy at Lund Observatory. At Lund I work within the Theoretical Astrophysics group headed by Melvyn Davies. I study on the physics of stars, within the framework of two broad questions:

• How do isolated stars evolve, what happens to them in their old age and how can we use astronomical observations to understand the physical processes involved?
• How do stars interact with one another, both in pairs or in larger groups? How can we model this, and what observable effects do these interactions have?

These are rather open-ended questions, and my current research focusses in particular on the following areas:

• How might gamma-ray bursts, short flashes of intense gamma radiation, form from binary star systems?
• What is the history of globular clusters, and what happens in their dense, crowded cores?
• What is the nature of the unusual stellar populations at the Galactic Centre, and how did they get there?
• Which stars are responsible for making the very heavy trans-iron elements, and how?

Some of the more specific projects I've worked on and problems I've tackled can be found on my work pages, as well as a list of publications, etc.

Before starting my Marie Curie fellowship my work in Lund was funded by the Wenner-Gren foundation. Prior to that I was a research fellow in the School of Mathematical Sciences, Monash University. My undergraduate education was in physics and my PhD in astronomy at Cambridge University.

I have a gallery of photos, though more recently I've started uploading them to Facebook. I (very) occasionally write my thoughts up in the form of a weblog. Other pages here include a few LaTeX problems that I came across whilst writing my thesis, a set of computer notes that I wrote to remind myself how to do infrequent and non-obvious tasks, and some observations on the behaviour of the rat with application to its removal from student rooms.