Dr Ian Heywood
Dr Ian Heywood is a Research Associate at Green Templeton College, University of Oxford.
Ian is a senior researcher in radio astronomy at Oxford as well as a visiting professor at Rhodes University in South Africa. Ian specialises in processing the huge volumes of data that modern radio telescopes produce, and these days mainly use the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa, which is the most powerful of its kind in the world.
Ian is interested in how supermassive black holes influence their host galaxies (including our own), and how we can detect the hydrogen that is the fuel supply for star formation in more distant galaxies.
He is also working on a system to rapidly make movies of the radio sky in order to search for bursts of radio emission from extreme and exotic objects, and potentially radio transmissions from extraterrestrial civilisations.
