Roger Davies

University of Oxford

Roger Davies started his research in Cambridge and spent 6 years at NOAO in Tucson, Arizona. He worked out a new way of measuring the distances to galaxies and discovered the “Great Attractor”, a huge concentration of galaxy clusters in the southern sky. He moved to Oxford in 1988 to lead the UK’s participation in the 8m Gemini telescopes. In 1994 he took up the post of Professor of Astronomy at Durham University and in 2002 he returned to Oxford and served as Chairman of the Physics Department and Head of Astrophysics. He was the founding Director and led the Hintze Centre for Astrophysical Surveys until his retirement in 2022. He was also President of the Royal Astronomical Society and President of the European Astronomical Society. His research interests center on cosmology and how galaxies form and evolve.