Professor Ron Ekers

Professor Ron Ekers is a CSIRO fellow and an adjunct Professor at Curtin University in Perth and the Raman Research Institute in India.  He was appointed Foundation Director of CSIRO’s Australia Telescope National Facility and returned to Australia in 1988 after a career in Europe and the US.  He continued in this role until he took up an Australian Federation Fellowship (2003-2008).  He became a CSIRO Fellow in 2008.

He graduated from the University of Adelaide in 1963 and gained his PhD in astronomy at the Australian National University in 1967. His professional career has taken him to the California Institute of Technology (1967-70), the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy in Cambridge, UK (1971), the Kapteyn Laboratory in Groningen, The Netherlands (1971-76), and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, New Mexico USA (1980-88).

He was director of the VLA, the major national radio telescope in the USA, from 1980 until 1987, chair of the SKA steering committee 2000-2002 and president of the International Astronomical Union from 2003 to 2006.  He is a member of the boards of Astronomy Australia Ltd,  Royal Society (Australia) Pty Ltd, and the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO).

He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the Royal Dutch Academy of Science, a Foreign Member of the American Philosophical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

His research interests include extragalactic astronomy, especially cosmology, galactic nuclei, ultra high energy particle physics and radio astronomical techniques.