Rob Jeffries

Biography

I was appointed to a lectureship at Keele in 1995 and promoted to Reader in 2001. and Professor of Astrophysics in 2010. Prior to this I was a post-doctoral research assistant in X-ray astronomy at the University of Birmingham and this is also where I obtained my PhD in 1991.

I am Head of Physics and Deputy Head of the School of Chemical and Physical Sciences. I am active in teaching, research and public engagement - I led the Keele "Stardome" initiative that won the Times Higher Education award for widening participation in 2015 (see my website for details).

Research and scholarship

Stars like the Sun or of even lower mass are born in clusters and associations. I search for young Suns, low-mass stars and brown dwarfs in star forming regions and clusters in order to find how common they are in a variety of environments and follow the temporal evolution of their discs, rotation rates, magnetic activity and chemical abundances.

The goals are to understand the way in which birth environment influences the development of low-mass stars (and their planetary systems) and to investigate the astrophysics, such as mixing, convection and magnetic fields, that are incorporated into pre main sequence evolutionary models.

See personal website for further information

Teaching

Year 1

Phy-10023 Electricity and Stellar Structure (Laboratory Component)

Year 2

Phy-20006 Quantum Mechanics (Maths component)

Phy-20026 Statistical Mechanics and Solid State Physics (Maths component)

Year 3

Phy-30003 The Physics of Compact Objects (Module Leader)

Phy-30012 Electromagnetism (Module Leader)

PHY-30035 General Relativity, Black Holes and Gravitational Waves (Module Leader)