Matthew Peter Redman

I completed my doctoral studies under Professor John Dyson at the University of Manchester, following him to the University of Leeds. A new model for one of the earliest manifestations of the birth of the most massive stars was developed. Upon graduation I moved back to the Jodrell Bank Observatory at the University of Manchester as a postdoctoral fellow with Professor John Meaburn. Using instruments installed on the Anglo- Australian Telescope, led to thediscovery of highly explosive outbursts in objects known as Planetary Nebula, which had previously been thought to evolve in a steady fashion. This was followed by the discovery of evidence for sequential, nested supernova explosions in two peculiar objects, the Pencil Nebula and the Honeycomb Nebula.Moving on to work with Professor Jonathan Rawlings, at University College London I broadened my research into the formation of sun-like stars and in collaboration with Dr Eric Keto in Harvard, we employed a state of the art 3D radiative transfer code to decode the complex line appearance of star forming regions. A more advanced code than previously used, coupled with observations from the James Clark Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii led to the realisation that complex appearance of these regions can be explained by a simple underlying geometry, viewed from different angles. An IRCSET postdoctoral fellowship at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (where I remain a Research Associate) was followed by a faculty appointment at NUIG in 2004. My research programmes now bring together the themes of star formation and star destruction and I have studied how low mass star formation can proceed in the vicinity of violent massive stars. A recently new research theme, inspired by the widespread discovery of exoplanets, is to investigate the effects of the destruction of planets on the evolution of sun-like stars as they evolve to form (coincidentally, and confusingly misnamed!) planetary nebulae, the shaping of which are not understood. This work has been well supported by grants for PhD students and a postdoctoral researcher.

Star and planet formation; Planetary nebulae; Supernova remnantsWe use observational, theoretical and numerical techniques to observe and model the star formation process. We also study star destruction processes through phenomena such as planetary nebulae and supernova remnants. 

A university is a place of both teaching and research and I believe the best university teaching takes the student to the boundaries of current knowledge and then, at advanced undergraduate and postgraduate level, into research itself. In learning to think like a physicist, I believe a student must build up a body of basic knowledge of maths, physics and elements from other physical sciences; become practised and skilled at conducting experiments and analysing the results; and develop robust problem solving approaches and strategies. The combination of these techniques and knowledge leads to the physical intuition that is perhaps the most valuable skill that a physicist possesses: the ability to capture the key elements of complex phenomena or systems and describe them mathematically.