The Royal Society has recently awarded Prof Don Pollacco with a Wolfson Merit Award in recognition of his outstanding scientific achievements. The award will help support his research program on the discovery and characterisation of exoplanets (planets around other stars) for the next 5 years.

The Royal Society Wolfson Merit awards were established in 2000 in order to recognise the research programs of leading academics establishing their careers at UK Universities. The scheme is jointly supported by the Wolfson Foundation and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and is administered by the Royal Society.

Don Pollacco joined the University of Warwick in 2012 and is Professor of Astronomy within the Department of Physics. He is the Principal Investigator of the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP), which remains the most successful ground based exoplanet discovery program. He is also the Science Coordinator for ESA’s PLATO mission which is due for launch in 2024 with the aim of detecting rocky planets around sun-like stars.

Describing his research Professor Pollacco said, “I feel honored to have been awarded this prestigious prize. The next few years are going to be very exciting. With the Warwick led NGTS experiment we hope to be able to understand why Neptunes and massive rocky planets that appear in other solar systems seem quite different to those in ours. Is the solar system really so unique? After that we have PLATO which will enable us to find true earth like planets for the first time.”

AB 16/3/2016

For further details contact Alex Buxton

Tel: 02476 150423

Mob: 07876 218166

a.buxton.1@warwick.ac.uk