I am an Associate Professor working in the areas of exoplanets and Space Domain Awareness.

I am a founding member of the WASP and NGTS projects, both of which are ground-based wide-field optical surveys designed to discover new exoplanets using the transit method. In these projects I have played a key role in designing, implementing and operating the computing hardware and software infrastructure required to process and store the significant quantities of data that they produce every night. I am also involved in the PLATO mission through the PLATO Data Centre.

More recently I have moved to work in Space Domain Awareness, as from a technical point-of-view there is a great deal of overlap between the data-handling techniques used in wide-field exoplanet surveys and those required for monitoring the behaviour of spacecraft and debris in Earth orbit. My most recent work in the SDA area is centred on high-speed multi-band photometry of objects in low-Earth orbit, and in leveraging the power of GPUs to achieve real-time analysis of high-speed imaging data from CMOS and InGaAs imaging sensors.

In the past I have worked in X-ray astronomy (specifically the ROSAT and XMM-Newton missions) and High-Performance Computing (HPC).

View my publication list in ADS.

Contact details

Dr Richard West
Department of Physics
University of Warwick
Coventry
CV4 7AL

Tel:
eMail: Richard.West (at) warwick.ac.uk