Director of the MERLIN/VLBI National Facility
3 February 1999
Professor Andrew Lyne has been appointed Director of the Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories of the University of Manchester.
Professor Lyne will be the fourth Director, following in the footsteps of Sir Bernard Lovell, Sir Francis Graham-Smith and Professor Rod Davies. He is one of the world's leading experts on Pulsars and this work led him to be appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1996.
Having read Natural Sciences at Cambridge, he came to Manchester in 1964 to study the structure of radio sources by observing them whilst being occulted by the Moon.
He was using the 76m MK1 radio telescope, when the discovery of the first Pulsar was announced by Cambridge astronomers. The telescope proved ideally suited for the study of these objects and Professor Lyne was part of a team which was able, within two weeks, to publish a paper in Nature giving much additional information about this first pulsar.
Since then, he has remained at the forefront of Pulsar research, leading recently to the discovery of the 1000th pulsar in our galaxy.
