Scientist to share lifetime of adventures in free talk
A leading scientist and author who has spent more than 50 years working on exciting projects across the globe will share stories of his adventures during a free talk.
Barry Giles has studied distant planets, binary stars, neutron stars, stellar mass black holes and active galaxies, undertaken research voyages as a physical oceanographer and worked with major organisations including the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Barry will give a talk called ‘A Piece of the Action – STEM++ adventures below, on, above and beyond planet Earth’ at Space Park Leicester’s next Space Park Conversations free event at 2.30pm on Monday, September 8.
Barry, who obtained his BSc (Hons) in 1973 in Astronomy & Physics, and his PhD (1978) within the Physics Department in high-energy astrophysics at the University of Leicester, said: “My talk is an attempt to describe the highlights of my varied scientific career over the last 50 years at many locations across our little planet while based in the UK, Australia and the USA.”
After emigrating to Australia in the early 1980s he joined the X-ray astronomy group within the Physics Department at the University of Tasmania (UTAS). He also worked for several years at CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) in Hobart as a physical oceanographer and undertook two research voyages.
In the 1990s he moved to the USA where he played a significant role at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, working on the RXTE X-ray astronomy satellite mission which collected information about the extreme environments that surround black holes, neutron stars, white dwarfs and other cosmic objects that emit X-rays.
Returning to Tasmania, his employment was again linked to UTAS or the Australian Antarctic Division as a glaciologist, eventually having honorary positions in both Physics and at IMAS (Institute for Marine & Antarctic Studies)/ACE-CRC (Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre). Much of that activity involved analysis of remote sensing images of Antarctica particularly using radar (SAR) based data.
In 2012, he also participated in the SIPEX-II cruise to Antarctica on the icebreaker Aurora Australis.