Professor Roger Davies

Professor Roger Davies

Professor Roger Davies

Professor Roger Davies (Churchill 1975), is the Professor emeritus Philip Wetton Chair of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford.

Professor Davies started his research working on galaxy dynamics in Cambridge in the 1970s after which he moved to California before spending 6 years on the staff of the US National Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. As part of the “7 Samurai” team, 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 construction of the 8m Gemini telescopes in Hawaii and Chile. In 1994 he took up the post of Professor of Astronomy at Durham University returning to Oxford in 2002 where he was Chairman of the Physics Department and then Head of Astrophysics. He was the founding Director of the Hintze Centre for Astrophysical Surveys. He was President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2010-2012, was awarded the Hoyle medal of the Institute of Physics in 2021 and was elected President of the European Astronomical Society in 2017.

Positions: 
  • Professor Emeritus Philip Wetton Chair of Astrophysics, University of Oxford
College: 
Churchill 1975