Gaia People

Nic Walton

Institute of Astronomy
University of Cambridge

Nic Walton has been a member of the Gaia Science Team since autumn 2007. He is also active in CU5 (the Photometric processing activity of DPAC).

Nic is at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, where he is Project Scientist of both the UK's Astrogrid (http://www.astrogrid.org) and the Euro-VO Technology Centre (http://www.eurovotech.org). The Virtual Observatory technologies that these initiatives are creating will be employed by ESA/DPAC when making the Gaia intermediate and final data products available to the community.

Nic gained his PhD from Imperial College London - investigating the properties and distributions of Planetary Nebulae with the hottest central stars. After postdoctoral positions in Groningen and UCL, he worked on La Palma, at the ING where he was responsible for amongst other things, the instrumentation programme for the observatory. He was project scientist for the INT Wide Field Camera and the ING WIde Field Survey programme.

His scientific interests encompass a range of topics utilising large scale surveys. He is a member of the Supernova Cosmology Project, using Type Ia SN to probe the energy content of the Universe. He is a co-I of the IPHAS survey (http://www.iphas.org) - this survey mapping the entire galactic plane (in r, i, H-alpha). This survey will greatly benefit from access to the Gaia catalogues, as Gaia will go deep enough to give accurate distance to many of the objects detected by IPHAS.

Nic's homepage is at http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~naw

[Published: 27/03/2008]