Dr Mark Walker (Director, Manly Astrophysics)
Mark grew up in East Yorkshire. He was the first in his family to go to university and he was lucky enough to go to Oxford, graduating in 1985 with a double major in Physics and Rowing.
Eventually he figured out that astrophysics was what he wanted to do and he went off to America to pursue graduate studies, receiving his PhD from the Pennsylvania State University in 1991.
He then moved to Sydney to work at the Anglo-Australian Observatory as a Royal Society Research Fellow for a year. Finding that he liked Australia, he joined the Research Centre for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Sydney where he stayed until 2004. Between 2000 and 2003 he had a joint appointment with the university and CSIRO (Australia Telescope National Facility). He then spent a year at ASTRON and the Kapteyn Institute, Groningen (The Netherlands). In 2007 he founded Manly Astrophysics.
Mark's research interests are varied. His graduate studies centred on X-ray astronomy, but he has since migrated down to the other end of the electromagnetic spectrum and is working mainly in the infrared and radio domains. He aims to be a generalist within the field of astrophysics, being focused primarily on creativity, but he is generally confused.