Professor Matthew Bailes

Biography

Professor Matthew Bailes is a former Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and the Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav). He is a world leader in the discovery and timing of millisecond pulsars and has made pivotal contributions to the discovery of the Fast Radio Bursts – enigmatic millisecond-duration bursts of radio waves that strike the Earth many thousands of times per day and are of unknown origin. In 2023 this was recognised when he was awarded the Shaw Prize in Astronomy.

Professor Bailes’ research mainly concerns developing instrumentation for time domain astrophysics and using it for pulsar and FRB discovery in conjunction with collaborators in Australia, Europe, South Africa and the US. He is the leader of the MeerTime collaboration that is using the MeerKAT radio telescope
in South Africa to explore relativistic gravity with rafdio pulsars.

Professor Bailes founded the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne in 1998 and served as its Director for the first 12 years. In 2021
he co-founded the spin-off company Fourier Space Pty Ltd with his former staff and students. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Sciences.