Dr Matt Nicholl

Dr Nicholl obtained his undergraduate degree from Oxford in 2012 and his PhD from Queen’s University Belfast in 2015. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In 2018 he became a Royal Astronomical Society Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, before accepting a lectureship at the University of Birmingham. In 2020 he was awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant to investigate rare astrophysical explosions using all-sky surveys and novel machine learning methods. In 2023 he returned to QUB as a Reader in Astrophysics. His research group investigates a wide range of energetic and explosive transients, with a particular focus on how early detection and classification, combined with modelling of large samples, can reveal the physical mechanisms that power these events.