Ray Norris

Ray Norris is an astrophysicist at the CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility.

He grew up in England, and attended St. Albans School, where he became notorious for his passion for Amateur Radio, and built a small radio-telescope at home operating at a wavelength of 13 cm. A high point of this project was detecting the Apollo 13 spacecraft, listening in to the astronauts' conversations. He then studied at Cambridge, where he received an Honours Degree in Theoretical Physics. He went on to do a PhD and a postdoc at Jodrell Bank, near Manchester, UK, where he tried to use natural interstellar masers to unravel the processes of star formation. He also tackled the problem of whether Stonehenge and other Bronze-age monuments had been built as astronomical observatories (they were, but not very good ones).

In 1983, Ray and his family fled from the cold and murky Manchester weather to the sunnier climes of Sydney, to help with the design of the Australia Telescope. His research interests gradually moved outwards from star formation to luminous galaxies, and he shouldered an increasing management role. In 2000 he became Deputy Director of the ATNF, and in 2001 he led the successful bid for Australian astronomy under the Federal Government’s “Major National Research Facilities” (MNRF) program, and then established and was Foundation Director of the Australian Astronomy MNRF. In 2005, he took a break from management to concentrate on research, and is currently trying to image the first galaxies in the Universe, in an effort to understand how they form and evolve.

He is also fascinated by the challenge of optimising the transformation of scientific data into knowledge, and ensuring that they are available to all scientists through the data centres and Virtual Observatory, rather than being hidden in some dusty archive. To this end, he is active in CODATA (the Data Committee of the International Council for Science) and IAU Commission 5 (Astronomical Data).

In 2005 he started to study the astronomy of indigenous Australians, and was stunned by the depth and richness of culture which is largely unappreciated in non-indigenous communities. This study has now become a significant research project.

Outside his professional life, he relaxes by writing and bushwalking.

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