Prof. Rob Fender’s research interests focus on accretion and feedback around relativistic objects, such as black holes and neutron stars, primarily advanced through observations with radio telescopes such as AMI-LA, e-MERLIN, and MeerKAT. He also participates in wide-field commensal searches for radio transients. He recently served as the Head of the Astrophysics subdepartment within the broader Department of Physics at the University of Oxford before beginning his working visit to the IAC. At Oxford, he leads a large group focused on transients and accretion and heads the transients initiative at the Hintze Center for Astrophysical Surveys. In 2021, he became the co-leader of the next-generation Astrophysical Transients working group for the Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT). In December 2022, he was awarded a Synergy Grant of 14 million euros, alongside Sera Markoff and Heino Falcke, for the ‘Blackholistic’ project, which aims to unify our understanding of black holes across all mass scales.
Among his achievements, he led the national collaboration through which the United Kingdom joined the LOFAR project, was awarded an ERC Advanced Researcher Grant in 2011, served as chair of the SKA Transient Science Working Group, and received the Herschel Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2020 for “research of exceptional merit in observational astrophysics,” primarily recognizing his work on accretion around black holes and their connection with relativistic jets. He has also received the Philip Leverhulme Prize, a Marie Curie Fellowship, an NWO VIDI award, and a Leverhulme Senior Research Scholarship.
Prof. Fender has held positions as a Professor of Physics at the University of Southampton, Universitair Hoofddocent at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Grenoble. Since 2010, he has also served as an SKA Visiting Professor at the University of Cape Town.
During his visit to the IAC, Prof. Fender will collaborate with Dr. Teo Muñoz-Darias, Dra. Montserrat Armas Padilla, Prof. Jorge Casares, and other members of the “Black Holes, Neutron Stars, and White Dwarfs” group. Their research will focus on investigating the flow of mass and energy around stellar-mass black holes and neutron stars in binary X-ray systems. The team aims to integrate new and improved estimates of the disk’s lost mass, whether through winds, jets, or matter crossing the event horizon, to provide the most comprehensive analysis to date of the flow of mass and energy during black hole eruptions.
