Professor Roger Davies

Senior Member

Prof Roger Davis is an Emeritus Professor of Astrophysics, having held the Philip Wetton Chair in Astrophysics from 2002 until 2022. He is affiliated with Christ Church. His research interests revolve around cosmology and the formation and evolution of galaxies. With a longstanding fascination with astronomical instruments and telescopes, he has been the founding Director of the Oxford Hintze Centre for Astrophysical Surveys since 2014.

Originally from Scunthorpe in North Lincolnshire, Prof Davis attended John Leggott School before pursuing Physics as an undergraduate at UCL and completing his PhD at the Institute of Astronomy and Churchill College, Cambridge. He then moved to the United States, where he worked at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson, AZ, now part of NSF's NOIRLab. He contributed to the Seven Samurai collaboration, which surveyed the distances and velocities of galaxies, leading to the discovery of the 'Great Attractor', a concentration of galaxy clusters exerting gravitational pull on the Milky Way towards the constellations of Hydra and Centaurus.

In 1988, Prof Davis relocated to Oxford to lead the team tasked with constructing a UK 8m telescope, which eventually led to the membership of the Gemini Observatory. Since then, he has served as project scientist for various instruments. He held the position of Head of Astronomy at Durham University in 1994 before returning to Oxford to assume the Wetton Chair in 2002. Prof Davis is renowned for pioneering the use of a new class of astronomical spectrograph to measure the masses and ages of galaxies, as well as to search for black holes in their nuclei.

He served as Head of the Physics Department at Oxford from 2005 to 2010 and as Head of Astrophysics from 2011 to 2014. Prof Davis is a Fellow of UCL and of the Institute of Physics and holds an honorary degree from University Claude Bernard in Lyon, France. He served as President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2010 to 2012 and has been President of the European Astronomical Society since 2017. In 2021, he was elected to the AURA Board of Directors.