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Professor Warrick Couch

Distinguished Professor

Biography

Professor Warrick Couch is a Distinguished Professor at Swinburne’s Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing. Prior to coming to Swinburne, he was Director of the Australian Astronomical Observatory based in Sydney.

His principal research area is extragalactic astronomy and cosmology, with a particular focus on the role environment plays in the evolution of galaxies. This research involves major observational programs using the largest ground-based optical telescopes (VLT, Keck) as well as space-based telescopes (HST, Chandra). He was also lead investigator of the Swinburne-led ‘WiggleZ’ Dark Energy Project that was conducted with the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope.

Professor Couch was a member of the Supernova Cosmology Project, whose leader (Saul Perlmutter) shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for the team's discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. He was also a joint winner of the 2007 Gruber Prize in Cosmology for his role in the discovery of the accelerating universe, and a joint winner of the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, which ‘recognizes major insights into the deepest questions of the universe’. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Research interests

Astronomy; evolution of galaxies

PhD candidate and honours supervision

Higher degrees by research

Accredited to supervise Masters & Doctoral students as Principal Supervisor.

Fields of Research

  • Astronomical Sciences - 510100
  • Space Sciences - 510900

Publications

Also published as: Couch, Warrick; Couch, W.; Couch, W. J.; Couch, Warrick J.
This publication listing is provided by Swinburne Research Bank. If you are the owner of this profile, you can update your publications using our online form.

Recent research grants awarded

  • 2022: Ultra Diffuse Galaxies: Challenging the galaxy formation paradigm *; ARC Discovery Projects Scheme
  • 2020: Utilising artificial intelligence to elucidate the physics of galaxies *; ARC Discovery Projects Scheme
  • 2017: ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions *; ARC Centre of Excellence Scheme
  • 2017: ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery *; ARC Centre of Excellence Scheme
  • 2017: Unravelling the major transformation mechanism of disk galaxies *; ARC Discovery Projects Scheme
  • 2016: Australian membership of the European 4MOST Consortium *; ARC Linkage Infrastructure and Equipment Scheme
  • 2015: The Australian European Southern Observatory Positioner (AESOP) *; ARC Linkage Infrastructure and Equipment Scheme - For funding commencing in 2015
  • 2013: Elucidating the physical mechanisms of environment-driven galaxy evolution *; ARC Discovery Projects Scheme
  • 2013: The SAMI facility: a revolutionary multi-object hexabundle spectrograph *; ARC Linkage Infrastructure and Equipment Scheme
  • 2011: ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics *; ARC Centre of Excellence Scheme
  • 2011: Koala: a new integral field capability for the Anglo-Australian Telescope *; ARC Linkage Infrastructure and Equipment Scheme
  • 2010: GNOSIS: a new window on the early universe using revolutionary photonic technology *; ARC Linkage Infrastructure and Equipment Scheme

* Chief Investigator


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