Professor Rob Fender

Professor Rob Fender is a Governing Body Fellow and member of Fellowship Committee, Green Templeton College and until recently head of the Astrophysics sub-department within the broader Physics department, University of Oxford.

Rob’s particular research interests are in the areas of accretion and feedback around relativistic objects, mostly advanced via observations with radio telescopes such as AMI-LA, e-MERLIN and MeerKAT (although he dabbles in many other areas). As well as targeted studies, Rob is also involved in wide field commensal searches for radio transients.

Previously Rob was Professor of Physics at The University of Southampton, and prior to that Universitair Hoofddocent at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. He has been a Visiting Professor at The University of Grenoble, and holds a position as an Honorary Professor at The University of Cape Town.

Amongst other highlights, Rob led the national collaboration via which the UK joined the LOFAR project, was awarded in 2011 an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant, was chair of the SKA Transients Science Working Group, and was awarded the 2020 Herschel Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society for ‘investigations of outstanding merit in observational astrophysics’, mainly in recognition of his work on accretion around black holes and the connection to relativistic jets. He was proud to collect the 2023 Group Achievement Award on behalf of the MeerKAT project.

At Oxford, Rob has a large group working on astrophysical transients and accretion, and is co-lead of the Transients strand of the Hintze Centre for Astrophysical Surveys. He and several members of his team are members of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration.

In December 2022 Rob, Sera Markoff and Heino Falcke were awarded a €14 million ERC Synergy Grant, ‘Blackholistic’, to bring together our understanding of black holes on all mass scales. A key component of this project will be the construction of The African Millimetre Telescope (AMT) in Namibia, which will both dramatically extend the baseline coverage of the Event Horizon Telescope, and work as a stand-alone transients monitoring facility.