Rate My Professor Jonathan Hawthorn

Professor Jonathan Hawthorn is an ARC Laureate Fellow Professor of Physics in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney, where he also serves as Director of the Sydney Institute for Astronomy (SIfA) since January 2015. He earned his PhD from the Royal Greenwich Observatory and the University of Sussex. After his doctorate, he undertook a three-year postdoctoral position in astrophysics at the Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii. From 1988 to 1993, Hawthorn was a tenured professor in the Space Physics and Astronomy Department at Rice University, Texas. In 1993, he joined the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO) in Sydney and was appointed Head of Instrument Science in 2000, a division established to address needs in astronomical instrumentation. In 2007, he was awarded the Federation Fellowship, which brought a tenured professorship in SIfA. He co-founded the Institute of Photonics and Optical Science (IPOS) in 2009 and supervises Honours, MSc, PhD students, and postdoctoral fellows in astronomy, astrophotonics, space photonics, and quantum astronomy experiments.

Hawthorn's research interests encompass near-field cosmology, a new generation of astronomical instruments, photonics, and quantum astronomy. Notable projects include SAMI for integral field spectroscopy of thousands of galaxies (extended by Hector), HERMES for high-resolution spectroscopy of a million stars, GNOSIS, PRAXIS, MOHSIS, Pandora, Dragonfly, i-INSPIRE, and PIMMS. Key publications feature 'The Baryon Halo of the Milky Way' in Science (2000, with Ken Freeman), articles in Nature (1999) and Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics (2002, 2016), and Saas-Fee lectures (2007, extended in 2013 book). His photonic innovations have been adopted in medical, telecommunications, remote sensing, and food industries, with launches like the first balloon-based photonic experiment (2012) and Inspire-2 cubesat (2017). Awards include the Federation Fellowship (2007), election as Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and Optical Society of America (2012), Australian Laureate Fellowship (2014), UC Berkeley Professorship (2017), and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2023). He holds roles on the IAU Section H board and editorial board of Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics.