Professor Brad Gibson

Summary

Professor Brad Gibson is the Head of Physics, Director of the E.A. Milne Centre for Astrophysics, Director of Research for the School of Natural Sciences, and Interim Associate Dean within the Faculty of Science & Engineering, at the University of Hull. Brad completed his MSc and PhD at the University of British Columbia, building the world's first Liquid Mirror Telescope Observatory and designing software to map the distribution of the chemical elements throughout the Universe. Brad was responsible for using exploding stars to determine the expansion rate of the Universe, as part of the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project on the Extragalactic Distance Scale, for which his team was awarded the Gruber Prize in Cosmology. He was the first to identify the locations within the Milky Way most likely to harbour complex biological life, for which his work was named by National Geographic magazine as one of the Top 10 News Stories of the Year. Brad's work has been acknowledged by his peers 40,000 times, ranking him within the top few percent in the world.

Brad has been responsible for tripling the number of women entering physics at the University, as part of his commitment to widening participation and gender diversity in science, and improving the career prospects of physics students; this has all been accomplished under his "Changing Face of Physics" campaign, which led to the Department's Athena Swan award, and the campaign being named Best Practice in the Country by the UK's Equality Challenge Unit.

Brad is the University of Hull's most active outreach and public/schools engagement academic. Since 2016, he has more than 1000 events, reaching more than 60,000 people in-person (including 20,000+ students across 100+ different schools and colleges, 60% of which reside in the bottom two POLAR4 socio-economic quartiles. His online/media appearance have reached a further three million people around the world. His outreach efforts led to him being named the Institute of Physics’ John Porter Memorial Lecturer, the Leon Davies Lecturer (Glasgow), the Ray Bootland Memorial Lecturer, and Manchester’s Bexwyke Lecturer; he has spoken at the Cheltenham Science Festival, the British Science Festival, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and opened for Brian Cox and Lucy Hawking at European AstroFest, and delivered two highly popular TEDx talk on the subjects of the search for alien life and the likelihood of colonising Mars.

Brad currently serves as the Honorary President of the Association for Science Education, Deputy Chair of the Royal Society URF Panel, Deputy Chair of the IOP Head of Physics Steering Group, Scientific Editor for The Astrophysical Journal, and a member of the UKRI/LSST:UK Oversight Committee and AAS Prize Committee. He served on the REF2021 Physics Unit of Assessment Panel, and recently elected a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (FInstP).