2019 McCrea Lecture: 'The European Southern Observatory in 2019, and the evolution of galaxies as probed by ALMA'

About the lecture

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) - with Ireland as its latest Member State - is conducting an ambitious programme, building and operating world-class astronomical observatories on the ground and fostering cooperation in astronomy.  In this presentation, the Director of Science for ESO, Rob Ivison, will provide an update on recent progress in the various ESO programmes, the La Silla Paranal Observatory, the now fully operational Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA), and what will be the world’s largest observatory, the 39-m European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), under construction in Chile. Rob Ivison will close with a look at the latest breakthroughs in our understanding of the formation and evolution of galaxies, based largely on observations with ALMA.

About the speaker

Rob Ivison is the Director for Science at the European Southern Observatory (ESO). 
He is on secondment from the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh, where he is a Professor of Astrophysics and holds an ERC Advanced Grant (2013--). He studies the formation and evolution of galaxies, specialising in observations at far-infrared, submillimetre and radio wavelengths. He currently leads science projects with the Atacama Large Millimetre/Submillimetre Array (ALMA) in Chile and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Jansky Very Large Array (JVLA) near Socorro in New Mexico.