Physical Principles of Astronomical Instrumentation (PDF)

Professor Matt Griffin studied Electrical Engineering at University College Dublin and Astrophysics at Queen Mary College London, receiving his PhD in 1985. His research work has included the development of instruments for both ground-based and space-borne observatories, and their use in the study of planetary atmospheres, star formation, galaxy evolution. He remained at Queen Mary until 2001, and was involved in various ground-based submillimetre instruments and in ESA's Infrared Space Observatory. Since 2001, he has been with the Astronomy Instrumentation Group at Cardiff University. As well as participating in the SCUBA, SCUBA-2, and Planck-HFI instruments, he was the Principal Investigator for the Herschel-SPIRE satellite instrument, for which he was awarded the Royal Astronomical Society Jackson-Gwilt Medal in 2011. He is a Fellow if the Institute of Physics and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

Professor Carole Tucker

Professor Carole Tucker studied Physics and Maths at Reading University, then Medical Radiation Physics at Queen Mary and Westfield College, London, completing her PhD in 2001. Having undertaken a great deal of cleanroom device fabrication and spectroscopy work, she took her first post-doctoral position with the Astronomy Instrumentation Group at QMW, working on hardware provision and characterisation for the Herschel and Planck satellite missions. In 2001 she moved with the instrumentation group to Cardiff University, where she took her first academic position in 2006. Carole manages the quasi-optical filter production facility at Cardiff, which leads to involvement with a great number of international FIR space and ground-based instrument teams. In addition she works with industry, supplying technology to scientific disciplines outside of astronomy. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Royal Astronomical Society and of the Learned Society of Wales.