Welcome to Dominic Ford's Webpages

I am a post-doctoral Research Associate working on the European Square Kilometre Array Design Studies (SKADS) in the Astrophysics Group of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. The SKA will be an international radio telescope, to be built in either South Africa or Australia in stages throughout the 2010s. Among its many science objectives, it will probe the formation of the earliest galaxies and stars, giving a much clearer understanding of the origin of the structures which we see in the Universe today. Closer to home, it will be able to image planet-forming debris disks around nearby stars, and greatly increase the number of known pulsars in the Milky Way.

I was formerly a Research Student in Cambridge, under the supervision of Dr Paul Alexander. In my Ph.D. thesis, I developed a semi-empirical model of the propagation of radiation through galaxies, taking account of the effect of dust -- small micron-sized solid particles. Such a model is a powerful tool for studying the formation of stars, because many young stellar systems, both locally (e.g. the Orion nebula) and in distant galaxies (e.g. SCUBA sources), are observed to be heavily obscured by dust at visible wavelengths. Optical images cannot alone provide a complete view of these systems or allow accurate estimation of their rates of star formation, because they miss the most heavily obscured stellar nurseries.

As a student, I was a member of Trinity College, Cambridge; I now supervise first year undergraduate students for Jesus College.

© Dominic Ford 2009
Last updated: Monday, 30-Aug-2010 20:47:01 BST
Website published by dcf21@mrao.cam.ac.uk. This is not an official MRAO webpage.