Mike Cruise

Mike Cruise is a member of international teams searching for gravitational waves using ground based and space based facilities. He has published over 100 research papers and a text book on The Principles of Space Instrument Design. Mike is Chair of the European Space Agency's Human Exploration Science Advisory Committee and the UKSA Exomars Oversight Panel, Deputy Chair of the UKSA SPAC and Treasurer of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Mike obtained his BSc and PhD from University College London where he worked at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory on instrumentation for X-Ray Astronomy. In 1985 he was appointed Deputy Director. In 1986 he left UCL to become leader of the Astrophysics Group at the Rutherford Appelton Laboratory, subsequently becoming the Associate Director for Space. In 1995 he was appointed to a chair at the University of Birmingham, followed by five years as Head of School and five years as Pro Vice Chancellor for Research and Knowledge Transfer.

Mike has contributed significantly to a number of Space missions including Skylarks 921,922, 821,822,1104 Ariel V, Ariel VI, Hipparcos, AMPTE, ROSAT, Spektrum Roentgen Gamma, SOHO, Cluster, XMM-Newton, STEREO, LEGRI, SMEI. LISA Pathfinder and LISA.

Mike is part of the consortium which has built the payload for LISA Pathfinder, the technical pre-cursor to LISA- a space based gravitational wave observatory. He is also Co-I on the grants at Birmingham that fund the Advanced LIGO project- a ground based gravitational wave observatory now in operation.

Mike has pioneered the development of gravitational wave detectors for very high frequencies- above 1 MHz and has a long term interest in the interaction of gravitation and electromagnetism.

Research interests:

Gravitational Waves
Gravity
Space Instrumentation
Fundamental Physics