Our people

Simon Ellis is an Associate Professor at Macquarie University and an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney. Simon is Manager of the Instrument Science Group at AAO-Macquarie, where he leads the research and development of new instrument concepts and novel technologies for astronomy.  He has over 20 years experience working in many areas of astronomical research, from X-ray astronomy to optical astronomy, including observations, theory and modelling.  His research interests include clusters of galaxies, galaxy evolution, brown dwarfs, and the astrophysics of antimatter.  Simon has 79 total publications, of which 25 are first author and 42 are refereed, with 1794 total citations total, and 212 normalised citations, and an h-index of 25. Additionally, Simon has over a decade of experience in the development of astronomical instrumentation, and was the project scientist for the KOALA IFU on the AAT.  He has been involved in several on-telescope demonstrations of new photonic technologies including fibre Bragg gratings and integrated spectrographs.  He is actively involved in the development and testing of astrophotonics, including ring resonators, and multicore fibres.  Simon is an expert in the field of OH suppression, and was the instrument scientist for the GNOSIS instrument, the first astronomical instrument to use fibre Bragg gratings and photonic lanterns, and he is currently the instrument scientist for the PRAXIS near infrared spectrograph, the successor to GNOSIS.