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Andrew Lawrence FRSE (born 23 April 1954)[1]) is a British astrophysicist. He is Regius Professor of Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh based at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh.[2]
Andrew Lawrence | |
|---|---|
 Lawrence in 2012 | |
| Born | 23 April 1954 Margate, England |
| Education | Chatham House Grammar School |
| Known for | Quasars |
| Awards | Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1997), Group Award of the Royal Astronomical Society (2012) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Astrophysics |
| Institutions | University of Edinburgh |
| Doctoral advisor | Ken Pounds |
| Website | andyxlastro |
Lawrence was born 23 April 1954 in Margate, Kent, to Jack Lawrence and Louisa Lawrence (née Sandison). He attended Chatham House Grammar School,[3] and then studied Astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh.[4] He undertook postgraduate research at the Department of Physics,[5] University of Leicester, supervised by Ken Pounds. He completed his PhD in 1980, with a doctoral thesis entitled “X-ray observations of Active Galaxies”.[6] He then worked at the Centre for Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Royal Greenwich Observatory, during its incarnation at Herstmonceux, East Sussex; the School of Mathematical Sciences and then the Department of Physics, Queen Mary University of London; and in 1994 was appointed to the Regius Professor of Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh. In 2008-9 he had a sabbatical year at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University.
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Lawrence’s primary research has been in the field of Quasars and Active Galactic Nuclei, but he has also worked extensively in Survey Astronomy, creating the Wide Field Astronomy Unit[7] in 1999. He was the Principal Investigator for the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS), which received the Group Award of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2012.[8] He is one of the leaders of the global Virtual Observatory initiative [9] and a founder and past chair of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance.
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As of 2019, Lawrence had published over 300 scientific publications and had an h-index of 73. He has also published three books: Losing The Sky[10] about sky pollution by satellites, and two academic textbooks, Probability in Physics,[11] and Astronomical Measurement,[12] both with Springer. He has also published a short historical/popular booklet on the life and achievements of Charles Piazzi Smyth, the second Astronomer Royal for Scotland.
Lawrence teaches on the Massive open online course (MOOC) at Coursera on AstroTech: The Science and Technology behind Astronomical Discovery.[13] He has been involved in a number of Arts-science collaborations, notably with New York composer Matt Giannotti,[14] and with a Spanish film maker on the documentary A Residence Above The Clouds.[15]
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