Chris Evans

Head of Science & UK ELT Programme Lead

UK Astronomy Technology Centre, Edinburgh

I'm leading the UK's development programme for instrumentation for the Extremely Large Telescope, now under construction by ESO. I'm also the Project Scientist for the new CUBES spectrograph for the VLT.

My research is primarily on the evolution of massive stars, with wider interest in stellar clusters, the Magellanic Clouds and other Local Group galaxies. In the increasingly distant past I was a postdoc at the ING in La Palma (2002-2005), and before that a student/postdoc at UCL.

PI of the VLT-FLAMES Tarantula Survey [Paper I]

     • RSGs in 30 Dor: Physical properties / Constraints on binarity

     • Gaia DR2 reveals a very massive runaway star ejected from R136

     • Star-formation history of 30 Dor

     • An excess of massive stars in the local 30 Doradus starburst

Selected ELT work:

     • MOSAIC: SPIE 2018 paper

     • Multi-Object Spectroscopy on the E-ELT - White Paper, Jan. 2015

     • Potential of J-band stellar spectroscopy with ELTs

     • AO performances in cosmological deep fields

Selected other projects as co-I:

     • Future UV: US Decadal

     • ESA Voyage2050: 1908.04687 / 1908.05951 / 1911.00769

     • CUBES: Science case for near-UV spectroscopy with the VLT

     • HARMONI: First-light integral-field spectrograph for the E-ELT

     • MOONS: A new near-IR MOS for ESO's VLT

I'm a Visiting Professor at UoE's Institute for Astronomy

Past PhD students:

Dr Jaime Villaseñor: arXiv:2107.10170

Dr Lee Patrick: NGC 6822 / NGC 2100 / NGC 55

Dr Vincent Hénault-Brunet:SMC HMXB / R136: rotation / dispersion

Dr William Taylor: R139 letter / Sher 25

Dr Michael Campbell: MAD R136

Publications / Links / Twitter UK ATC, Royal Observatory, Blackford Hill, Edinburgh, EH9 3HJ, UK Telephone: +44-131-668-8364