I am working on wide‐field imaging and fibre‐fed spectroscopy instrumentation in visible and near‐infrared astronomy, both in instrument construction and science exploitation. My interests additionally include Cosmology, Galaxy Evolution, Instrument Design, Instrument Technologies, Applied Optics and Detector Design.
The widest-field spectroscopic instruments in astronomy are all fibre-fed, to allow multiple sight-lines on the sky to be reformatted to a single spectrograph entrance slit. Some of my current interests lie in photonics technology allowing for the suppression of the bright sky lines which dominate the observed background in the red and near-infrared parts of the spectrum at high spectral resolution. I am heavily involved in the FMOS instrument at Japan’s Subaru 8.3m telescope, which is the only facility instrument in astronomy that implements direct suppression of the OH‐emission lines at near‐infrared wavelengths. My research is also applied to the ESO’s 42m European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) and the William Herschel Telescope in La Palma.