I am a lecturer in the astrophysics group in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. My research centres around the use of a number of high-angular-resolution techniques to make images of astronomical objects at optical and infrared wavelengths.

Chief amongst these is the technique of interferometric aperture synthesis, in which light collected by multiple telescopes observing the same object is combined to yield an image with the resolution of a "synthetic aperture" which can be hundreds of metres across.

I am a System Architect for the Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer, an aperture synthesis telescope currently under construction in New Mexico, USA. When completed, it will produce images of astronomical objects with detail on scales some 100 times smaller than visible from the Hubble Space Telescope.

I also work on adaptive optics systems, which correct the distortions of astronomical images due to the "shimmering" of the Earth's atmosphere. The picture shows my face reflected in the deformable mirror of the ELECTRA adaptive optics system at Durham University. This mirror has 76 individually steerable elements whose positions are updated 1000 times a second to correct in real time for atmospheric distortions.