Fellows

Professor Rob Fender

Rob Fender Profile PictureProfessor Rob Fender is a Senior Research Fellow, Green Templeton College and 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 held a position as a Visiting SKA Professor at The University of Cape Town since 2010.

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.

At Oxford, Rob has a large group working on transients and accretion, and is head of the Transients strand of the Hintze Centre for Astrophysical Surveys.

In 2021, he became the co-lead of the next-generation Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT) working group on Astrophysical Transients.

In 2022, he became part of the Einstein Telescope science collaboration (OSB Division 4).

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 extend dramatically the baseline coverage of the Event Horizon Telescope, and work as a stand-alone transients monitoring facility.