Rate My Professor Simon Vaughan

Professor Simon Vaughan is Professor of Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester, where he serves as Head of School. He is a member of the Astrophysics Research Division and teaches throughout the physics degree programmes. Vaughan's career at the University of Leicester has spanned postdoctoral positions, temporary lecturer, lecturer, associate professor, and his current professorial role. He has extensive experience leading teaching enhancements, including serving as Senior Admissions Tutor and Academic Director, and co-designing the redesigned undergraduate physics curriculum implemented in 2016.

Vaughan's research focuses on X-ray studies of accreting black holes, including active galactic nuclei (AGN), gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), and black hole X-ray binaries in our Galaxy. Key interests include probes of strong gravity, time series analysis and astrostatistics, Bayesian data analysis in astronomy, and dust-scattering halos from GRBs—he discovered and confirmed the first example of the latter in 2004 using XMM-Newton data. He has secured principal investigator guest observer time on major missions including XMM-Newton (as PI or Co-I on several Large Programmes), Chandra, RXTE, and Swift, and contributed to the ESA Athena mission Working Group and Science Team. Vaughan has authored over 100 refereed publications, accumulating more than 6,000 citations, and published the book Scientific Inference: Learning with Data (Cambridge University Press, 2013), which supports his teaching on scientific methods. His contributions to variability modelling and time series techniques have advanced the field of high-energy astrophysics. Vaughan holds fellowships from the Institute of Physics, Royal Statistical Society, Royal Astronomical Society, and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, alongside memberships in the International Astronomical Union, European Astronomical Society, and COSPAR. He has received the Distinguished Teaching Fellowship (2015), was a finalist in the Discovering Excellence Awards (2019), earned multiple Students' Union Superstar Award nominations (2018–2020), and the Citizen’s Award Ignite Innovator (2021, jointly with Professor Mervyn Roy).