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Dr. Mike Barlow is a Professor and Head of Astrophysics at University College London. He received his PhD in astrophysics from the University of Sussex. Afterwards, he completed a European Space Research Organisation and NASA fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley and also a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Colorado. Mike worked as a Staff Scientist Anglo-Australian Observatory before coming to University College London. Mike is here with us today to tell us about his journey through life and science.
Some of the projects Mike has been involved in while at UCL include the production of the CGS3 mid-infrared spectrometer for the 3.8m UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT); the Ultra-High Resolution Facility (UHRF), an optical spectrometer with a resolving power of one million for interstellar absorption line studies at the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope; and Co-Investigator in the Long Wavelength Spectrometer (LWS) Consortium for the European Space Agency’s Infrared Space Observatory (ISO). He then became a member of the Science Team for the SPIRE far-IR/submillimetre imager/spectrometer for ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory. Mike is also a member of the European Science Team for the MIRI mid-infrared imager/spectrometer that will be one of the three main instruments on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, due for launch later this decade. Mike’s current research interests include investigating whether supernovae are significant dust contributors to low and high redshift galaxies, via ground-based and spaceborne studies of supernova remnants and young extragalactic supernovae; as well as observational and numerical modelling studies of ionized nebulae and blue compact dwarf galaxies.