Dr William Sutherland

William Sutherland

Senior Lecturer in Astronomy

School of Physical and Chemical Sciences
Queen Mary University of London
www.qmul.ac.uk/spcs/staff/academics/profiles/wjsutherland.html
Centre for Fundamental Physics

Research

Observational cosmology

Interests

My research has covered several areas relating to observational cosmology; in the 1990s I worked as a postdoctoral fellow and SERC Advanced Fellow in Oxford working on the IRAS PSCz redshift survey, the MACHO project gravitational microlensing survey (constraining compact-object dark matter), and the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey, which made the first detection of redshift-space distortion in 2001 and the joint-first detection of baryon acoustic oscillations in 2005.

From 2000 to 2009 I was the Project Scientist for design and construction of the VISTA telescope in Chile, first based at Edinburgh and Cambridge, joining QMUL (lead institute on VISTA) in 2007. Since the successful commissioning of VISTA in 2009, I have worked on several cosmological surveys using VISTA observations, including VIKING, GAMA and SHARKS. I am also involved in the design of the next-generation instrument for VISTA, a 2400-object multifibre spectrograph called 4MOST; and am working on constraining modified gravity using data from the GAIA spacecraft.