Richard Ellis (astronomer)

Richard Salisbury Ellis ( born May 25, 1950 in Colwyn Bay, Wales ) is a British astronomer. He is a professor at Caltech.

Ellis studied astronomy at University College London and at Wolfson College, Oxford University, where he received his doctorate in 1974. After that, he was at the University of Durham and the Royal Greenwich Observatory. In 1985 he became a professor in Durham and 1993 Plumian professor of astronomy at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Magdalene College. 1994 to 1999 he was the Director of The Astronomical Institute. In 1999 he went to Caltech. 2000 to 2005 he was the Director of The Palomar Observatory.

Ellis is observational astronomer, dealing particularly with the evolution of early galaxies and large structures in the universe. He was a member of the Supernova Cosmology Project, which determined the acceleration of the universe, for which its director Saul Perlmutter was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize. In the late 1990s he was involved in the Morphs collaboration (including with Alan Dressler ), which examines the development of different forms of galaxies. He explores early stars and galaxies, among others gravitational lensing effects and the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory.

He played an important role in the preparation for the planned Thirty Meter Telescope.

In 1995 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society, whose Bakerian lecture he gave in 1998 (The morphological evolution of the galaxy ). In 2008 he was CBE. In 2011 he received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.