Prof. Rod Davies CBE

Order of the British Empire

The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is an order of chivalry established on 4 June 1917 by George V of the United Kingdom. The Order comprises five classes in civil and military divisions...

 is a Professor of Radio Astronomy

Radio astronomy

Radio astronomy is a subfield of astronomy that studies celestial objects at radio frequencies. The initial detection of radio waves from an astronomical object was made in the 1930s, when Karl Jansky observed radiation coming from the Milky Way. Subsequent observations have identified a number of...

 at Jodrell Bank

Jodrell Bank

The Jodrell Bank Observatory is a British observatory that hosts a number of radio telescopes, and is part of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester...

 Observatory. Although retired he still works there regularly. He is the former director of the observatory. His main research interests include the Cosmic Microwave Background and the galactic foreground. He is also a Methodist preacher.

Background

Rod Davies was born into a family of sheep farmers in a tiny village in the bush north of Adelaide, South Australia. He got sent to school as a punishment for setting a haystack on fire. He studied Astronomy at Adelaide University. He is currently residing in Cheshire with his wife, in the same town as they have lived in since they moved to Britain in the late 1950s. They have had four and eleven grandchildren.

• PhD, DSc. (University of Manchester)
• Fellow Institute of Physics; Chartered Physicist
• President of the Royal Astronomical Society (1987–89); Secretary (1978–86).
• Fellow of the Royal Society (1992)
• CBE (Queen’s Birthday Honours 1995)

• Born 8 January 1930, Balaklava, South Australia
• 1951 Honours degree in Physics, University of Adelaide; Research Officer in the Radiophysics Division, CSIRO, Sydney.
• 1953 Appointed Assistant Lecturer, University of Manchester.
• 1956 PhD (University of Manchester). Lecturer in Physics.
• 1963 Sabbatical year at Radiophysics Division, CSIRO, Sydney.
• 1976 Appointed Professor of Radio Astronomy, University of Manchester.
• 1988–1997 Director, Jodrell Bank Observatory, University of Manchester.
• 1972–1995 Member and chairman of various committees and boards of the UK Science Research Council and its successors.
• 1997 Professor Emeritus, University of Manchester.
• Currently co-investigator on the Planck satellite of the European Space Agency and co-coordinator of the 14 Planck projects on Galactic and Solar System science.

Essays and papers

• "The Alpha and Omega of Space and Time" in God for the 21st Century, Russell Stannard
  Russell Stannard
  Russell Stannard is a retired high-energy particle physicist, who was born in London, England, on December 24, 1931. He currently holds the position of Professor Emeritus of Physics at the Open University...
  
   ed., Templeton Foundation Press, 2000, ISBN 1890151394
• Davies, R.D., 1960. MNRAS 120, 483. A study of neutral hydrogen in the solar neighbourhood of the Milky Way.
• Cooper, A. J., Davies, R.D., Booth, R.S. 1971. MNRAS 152, 383. Interferometric investigations of sources of OH emission.
• Davies, R.D., Gottesman, S.T., 1970. MNRAS 149, 237. Neutral hydrogen in M31. (I) - The distribution of neutral hydrogen.
• Davies, R.D. 1964. MNRAS 128, 133. A search for intergalactic neutral hydrogen. (II) – Data of cosmological significance derived from the observations.
• Davies, R.D., Pedlar, A., Mirabel, I.F., 1978. MNRAS 182, 727. A search for neutral hydrogen in primordial protoclusters at z = 3.33 and 4.92.
• Staveley-Smith, L., Davies, R.D, 1989. MNRAS 241, 787. The peculiar velocity of the Local Group.(III) – Dipole, quadrupole and infall solutions.
• Lasenby, A.N., Davies, R.D., 1983. MNRAS 203, 1137. Lambda 6-cm observations of the fluctuations in the 3 K cosmic microwave background.
• Hancock, S., Gutierrez, C., Davies, R.D., Lasenby, A., Rocha, G., Rebolo, R., Watson, R., Tegmark, M., 1997. MNRAS 289, 505. Studies of CMB structure at Dec = +40o. Analysis and cosmological interpretation.
• Dickinson. C., Battye, R., Carreira, P., Cleary, K., Davies, R.D., Davis, R.J., Genova-Santos, R., Grainge, K., Gutierrez, C., Hafez, Y., Hobson, M.P., Jones, M.E., Kneissl, R., Lancaster, K., Lasenby, A., Leahy, J.,P., Massinger, k., Odman, C., Pooley, G., Rajguru, N., Rebolo, R., Rubino-Martin, J.A., Saunders, R.D.E., Savage, R.S., Scaife, A., Scott, P., Slozar, A., Sosa-Molina. P., Taylor, A.C., Titterington, D., Waldram, E., Watson, R.A., Wilkinson, A., 2004. MNRAS 353, 732. High sensitivity measurements of the CMB power spectrum with the extended VSA (Paper VII).
• Davies, R.D,, Dickinson, C., Banday, A.J., Jaffe, T.R., Gorski, K.M., Davis, R.J., 2006. MNRAS 370, 1125. A determination of the spectra of Galactic components observed by the Wilkinson Microwave anisotropy Probe.