Dr Bob Fosbury, European Southern Observatory Josephine Butler College October – December 2013
Dr Bob Fosbury is Emeritus Astronomer at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), an intergovernmental organisation in Germany that builds and operates major astronomical observatories in Chile. For almost three decades he has been associated with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope project and, until the end of 2010, led the European team based at ESO that worked with NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. In 2010 he co-organised a major conference and exhibition in Venice that celebrated the achievements of the observatory.
With an early career based at both the Royal Greenwich Observatory (RGO) at Herstmonceux and the University of Sussex, Dr Fosbury has worked as an astrophysicist at the Anglo-Australian Observatory based in Sydney and, in the late 1970s, at ESO when it was based at CERN in Geneva. He returned to the RGO in the early 1980s during the establishment of the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma in the Canary Islands. Dr Fosbury has published extensively on astrophysical topics ranging from the outer atmospheres of sun-like stars, supermassive black holes in the cores of galaxies, and star and galaxy formation in the very young Universe. He has also published books, documentary films and HD TV podcasts for both Hubble and ESO.
In parallel with his professional scientific interests and activities, Dr Fosbury has maintained a broader view of light and colour which he has expressed through photography, spectroscopy and in collaboration with artists.
While at the IAS Dr Fosbury’s intention is to invert his perspective from that of an astronomer reaching towards the distant Universe to that of looking from afar at Earth, ‘the pale blue dot,’ and asking what could be learned from a study of ‘Colours from Earth.’ Explaining the nature of the blue in this description of our Earth is complex and leads to a practical interest into how Earth-like planets around other stars might appear with the next generations of huge telescopes.
Linda France, Policy and Enterprise Fellow St Aidan’s College
October – December 2013
Linda France is a freelance writer, editor, tutor and Mentor and for the past 30 years she has taught in Adult and Higher Education and in a wide range of settings.
In 1988 and 1989 Linda won First Prize in the Bloodaxe Books/Evening Chronicle Poetry Competition, which led to the publication of her first collection, Red (1992). Her subsequent poetry collections include: The Gentleness of the Very Tall (Bloodaxe 1994); Storyville (Bloodaxe 1997); The Simultaneous Dress (Bloodaxe 2002) and The Toast of the Kit Cat Club (Bloodaxe 2005).
Among her latest publications are book of days (Smokestack Books 2009) and You are Her (Arc Publications 2010). In 2012 Border Song, a collaboration with artist Kim Lewis, was published by Hareshaw Press. Linda also edited the acclaimed anthology Sixty Women Poets (Bloodaxe 1993). To mark its 20th anniversary an essay was commissioned for the spring 2013 edition of Poetry Review.
Linda has worked on a number of collaborations with visual artists and musicians. Permanent and temporary works have appeared in stone, metal, wood, glass, textiles, ceramics, paper, sound and light.
Linda has received several awards and Fellowships including, among others, a Tyrone Guthrie Award (1991); Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship (Massachusetts 1998) and Hawthornden Fellowships (1999 and 2007).
In 2012 she received major Arts Council England Award to continue her research into plant ecology in preparation for a new book of poems.
Linda’s travels in the Southern Hemisphere are part of her exploration of the effects of light on plants and humans and the implications of changing global weather systems. Her current poems attempt to dismantle ideas of the dark Other, testing the limits of what is visible to the eye and language itself, inspired by her discovery of Australia’s ‘alien’ plants, trees and insects.
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