Richard Edwin Hills
Richard Edwin Hills FRS FRAS (born 30 September 1945)[1] is emeritus professor of Radio Astronomy at the University of Cambridge.[2]
Richard Hills FRS FRAS | |
|---|---|
 Richard Hills at the Royal Society admissions day in July 2014 | |
| Born | Richard Edwin Hills 30 September 1945 |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | Bedford School |
| Alma mater | |
| Awards | Jackson-Gwilt Medal (1989) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Astronomy |
| Institutions | University of Cambridge |
| Thesis | Interferometric Observations of Radio-Emission from Galactic Water Vapour (1973) |
| Website | www |
Education
Born on 30 September 1945 and educated at Bedford School, Hill studied the Natural Science Tripos at Queens' College, Cambridge and then went to the University of California, Berkeley to complete his Doctor of Philosophy degree.
Career and research
Hills was a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn between 1972 and 1974, before he returned to the University of Cambridge and became involved in the development of telescopes and instrumentation for astronomy at wavelengths of around one millimetre—the spectral region that lies between radio waves and infrared—which is relatively unexplored.[3][4]
Hills worked as a scientist at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, where he observed distant, redshifted quasars and studied processes associated with star formation.[5] In December 2007 he was appointed as project scientist for the ALMA telescope, a sub-millimeter interferometer in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile.[6]
Hills is a Fellow of St Edmund's College, Cambridge and was Director of Studies for Natural Sciences at St Edmund's between 1990 and 2007. He was Professor of Radio Astronomy at the University of Cambridge between 1990 and 2007, Deputy Head of the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge between 1999 and 2003, and has been emeritus professor of Radio Astronomy at the University of Cambridge since 2012.[1]
Awards and honours
Hills was the awarded the Royal Astronomical Society's Jackson-Gwilt Medal in 1989, and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2014. His nomination for the Royal Society reads:
Since the early 1970s Richard Hills has played a leading role in the development of radio astronomy at millimetre wavelengths, an essential zone of the spectrum for the study of star formation in galaxies. As Project Scientist of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Hawaii he was closely involved with the design and operation of this highly successful telescope. For his outstanding contribution to this project he was awarded the Jacksonian Gwilt Medal and Gift of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1989. From 2007 to 2012 he was Project Scientist of the Atacama Large Millimetre/Submillimetre Array (ALMA) in Chile. The first scheduled observations at 345 GHz using 16 of the planned 66 antennas took place in September 2011. These demonstrated the full angular resolution obtained by phase-coherent aperture synthesis which requires continuous monitoring of atmospheric absorption along the line of sight above each antenna. The outstanding scientific leadership shown by Richard Hills undoubtedly played a major part in the success of this challenging international project.[7]
References
- Anon (2015). "Hills, Prof. Richard Edwin". Who's Who. ukwhoswho.com (online Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U20218. (subscription or UK public library membership required) (subscription required)
- Richard Edwin Hills publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
- "Mars probe may hinder science". Times Higher Education. Retrieved 2 October 2014.
- "Huge radio telescope ready for business". Retrieved 2 October 2014.
- https://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/fellows/individuals/recid=60.php
- "Closing the loop for ALMA". Retrieved 2 October 2014.
- "Professor Richard Hills FRS". Retrieved 2 October 2014.