About Bob Fosbury

Bob works for the European Space Agency as part of ESA's collaboration with NASA on the Hubble project. This work is based on the premises of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) near Munich in Germany. He started doing this in 1985, more than 5 years before launch and so has been involved in this huge project for quite a while. During the latter part of this period, Bob served on NASA's Ad Hoc Science Working Group and ESA's Study Science Team as they developed the instrument concepts for the James Webb Space Telescope, the next generation of space observatory.

Bob has published over two hundred scientific papers on topics ranging from the outer atmospheres of stars, the nature of quasars and active galaxies to the physics of forming galaxies in the most distant reaches of the Universe. He started his career at the Royal Greenwich Observatory (RGO) in Herstmonceux, England in 1969 and was awarded his PhD by the nearby University of Sussex in 1973. He then became one of the very first Research Fellows at the newly constructed Anglo Australian Observatory 4 metre telescope in New South Wales, Australia before going to ESO while it was based at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. He then had a spell of 7 years as a staff member at the RGO, working on instruments for the new observatory on La Palma in the Canary Islands and on the pioneering Starlink astronomical computer network.

Bob is currently chairman of the ESO Astronomy Faculty, the largest group of professional astronomers in Europe (and Chile), and is active in the close liaison between the ESO and ESA science programmes. He has had a lifelong interest is the study of natural phenomena of all kinds and is particularly interested in atmospheric optics and the origin of natural colour.