President, Royal Society of London
Member, IAC Board
Martin Rees is President of the Royal Society of London. He is Master of Trinity College and professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge. He is also Visiting Professor at Leicester University and Imperial College London. He was appointed Astronomer Royal in 1995, and was nominated to the House of Lords in 2005 by the House of Lords Appointments Commission.
Lord Rees first studied at Trinity College Cambridge and then held post-doctoral positions at Cambridge, California and Princeton before becoming a Professor at Sussex University in 1972. In 1973, he became a fellow of King's College and Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge, a post he held for eighteen years. For ten years he was director of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy.
He has worked extensively in the USA. He has twice been a Visiting Professor at both Harvard and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton where he is now a trustee. He was Regents Fellow of the Smithsonian institute, Washington between 1984 and 1988 and is a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He is a member of the Academia Europaea, and honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Pontifical Academy, and a number of other foreign academies.
Lord Rees' current research deals with high energy astrophysics, especially gamma ray bursts, galactic nuclei, black hole formation and radiative processes (including gravitational waves) and also cosmic structure formation including the early generation of stars and galaxies that formed at the end of the cosmic 'dark ages' more than 12 billion years ago relatively shortly after the "Big Bang". He has authored or co-authored seven books and about five hundred research papers.
His recent awards include the Royal Society's Michael Faraday Prize and lecture for science communication (2004), and the Royal Swedish Academy's Crafoord Prize (2005). Other notable awards include the Heinemann Prize (1984) and Science Writing award (1996) from the American Institute of Physics the latter for the book Gravity's Fatal Attraction - Black Holes in the Universe which he co-authored with Mitchell Begelman. Lord Rees received the Gold Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society (1988), the Einstein Award from the World Cultural Council (2003) and the UNESCO Neils Bohr medal (2005).
Lord Rees was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1979 and served as a member of its Council between 1983-85 and 1993-95. He held a Royal Society Research Professorship between 1992 and 2004. He is married to Professor Caroline Humphrey.