Simon J. Murphy

I am an ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the University of Southern Queensland. I study stellar pulsations detected in data from NASA’s Kepler and TESS missions, and use those pulsations to make inferences about the stars. I use stellar pulsations as clocks, to track the stars’ orbital motions through space and discover new binary systems in a parameter space inaccessible to other techniques. This provides clues on how binary stars form. I also use the pulsations to make inferences on stellar structure, including precise measurements of stellar ages and metallicities. With these, we can recalibrate the ages of the stars by determining the ages of the clusters and associations in which they reside. I graduated from the University of Manchester with a BSc (Hons) in 2010, completed my PhD at the University of Central Lancashire in 2013, and held multiple postdoc positions at the University of Sydney, including as an ARC DECRA fellow, until I moved to UniSQ in 2022.