Jacco van Loon

Biography

I was born in a small village in The Netherlands, near Arnhem. After my primary and secondary education in Alkmaar I went on to study Astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam. This is also where I obtained my Ph.D., in 1999, after having spent the first two years at the European Southern Observatory Headquarters near Munich in Germany. Then I got married, spent two years in Cambridge as a postdoctoral researcher, and in 2001 took up a lectureship at Keele University where I got promoted to Reader in 2008.

Research and scholarship

My research concentrates on "Stellar Ecology": the interplay between stars and their environment. Stars form from dense clouds of gas and dust, most of which was previously burnt inside stars and ejected by them as they died. This mass-loss process can happen in different ways, via winds or explosions. Much of my research is aimed at understanding how these mechanisms work, and how they would operate under conditions that were prevalent in the early Universe but which we can no longer observe locally. In order to better understand the impact of the ejecta on the future of their host galaxies, I investigate the small-scale structure of the diffuse interstellar medium.

My work is observationally driven, using the largest facilities in space (e.g., the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope) and on the ground (ESO Very Large Telescope, Arecibo radio telescope, et cetera), and my Ph.D. students have gone on several observing trips to Chile and Australia. But I am interested also in developing theoretical frameworks for interpreting these observations.

In 2007 I was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, to work on the neighbouring spiral galaxy Messier 33 together with an Iranian Ph.D. student. This has led to a new technique to determine the star formation histories in nearby galaxies. My future work will probably take me to more distant galaxies, to understand how the Universe evolved to the way it appears to us now.

Picture shows the globular cluster omega Centauri

For more details see http://www.astro.keele.ac.uk/~jacco

Teaching

• PHY-10029: Introduction to Astronomy (Observatory laboratory)
• PHY-10030: Scientific Practice (module leader)
• PHY-20027: Thermodynamics (this is half the module)
• PHY-20028: Galaxies (module leader)
• PHY-30025 Life in the Universe (module leader)