Alan Duffy

As PVC Flagship Initiatives, Professor Duffy is tasked with driving large and ambitious transdisciplinary research across our flagship research areas by actively engaging with external organisations (including government, industry, NGOs) to identify large-scale opportunities that require university-wide collaboration and the formation of coalitions of universities and partners. Alan has a background in astrophysics/space, as the inaugural Director of the Space Technology and Industry Institute at Swinburne he helped communities and companies solved their challenges on Earth through space, with multidisciplinary teams across the University's domains of excellence in aerospace engineering, data science / AI, astrophysics, and material science.

His research background is in creating simulated universes on supercomputers to understand how galaxies like the Milky Way form within vast clouds of dark matter, using SPH and N-Body+SAM techniques. He then tries to find this dark matter as a Chief Investigator of SABRE, the world’s first dark matter detector in the Southern Hemisphere, housed in the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory. As Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics, he utilises a full range of other observational experiments (including microlensing, gamma-ray emission and galaxy velocity field tracers) to constrain the properties of dark matter.

Alan is also the cofounder and CEO of mDetect, a spin-off company from his dark matter research, that uses particles from space to scan through rock for mineral exploration, identification of structural weaknesses in tailings dams, and subsidence/air gaps below critical infrastructure.

With a long-standing interest in how to best present these discoveries to academic and general public audiences, Alan has regular segments on ABC Breakfast TV, Ten’s The Project, Nine's Today, and ABC TripleJ radio; with over 300 TV appearances and 440 radio interviews to date, he is one of Australia's best-known scientists. He also has a passion for undertaking live talks, having spoken at dozens of schools across the country; as well as delivering a TEDx talk in the Sydney Opera House (viewed over 118,000 times online), touring the country with RiAus / BBC Worldwide’s Science of Doctor Who Live, interviewing Dr Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Prof Brian Greene, and Dr Jane Goodall in front of thousands at MCEC, discussing science careers to 4500 primary students at National Young Leaders Day at MCEC, and hosting Sydney’s AstroFest to 2000 people. Visualisations of the model universes have significantly aided in understanding the physics at play in forming a galaxy and formed the basis, created with colleagues from around the world, for the planetarium show DARK: Understanding Dark Matter, which has been shown in 148 theatres worldwide.