Rob Fender

Dr Rob Fender is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford. He was Head of Astrophysics at Oxford from 2019 to 2024 before which he was at the University of Southampton, and the Universiteit van Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Since 2010 he holds a position as a Visiting Professor at The University of Cape Town.

His particular research interests are in the areas of accretion and feedback around relativistic objects, mostly advanced via observations with radio telescopes such as AMI-LA, e-MERLIN and MeerKAT.
As well as targeted studies, he is also involved in wide field commensal searches for radio transients,  population studies and modelling of the phenomena we see.

In a distinguished career, highlights include winning the 2020 Herschel Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, and he has been a recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize, a Marie Curie Fellowship, an NWO VIDI prize, and a Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship. 
In December 2022 he, Sera Markoff and Heino Falcke were awarded a 14 million Euro ERC Synergy Grant, 'Blackholistic', to bring together our understanding of black holes on all mass scales. A key component of this project will be the construction of The African Millimetre Telescope (AMT) in Namibia which will both extend dramatically the baseline coverage of the Event Horizon Telescope, and work as a stand-alone transients monitoring facility.