I have always lived in the Bradford area. I went to Clayton Infants and Junior Schools followed by Thornton Grammar School. I became passionately interested in Astronomy and after a degree in Physics at Queen Mary College of London University I started a research career in the Physics Department of Leeds University. I was also interested in politics and so when it appeared that data I had found indicated that we might have found a new sub-nuclear particle from Cosmic Ray interactions, I suggested that it might be called Mandela after Nelson and Winnie Mandela. At that time in 1973 Nelson Mandela was in the Robben Island prison and Apartheid ruled South Africa. I thought their time would come and so would this new nuclear particle. As with many things scientific, the data improved the particle went away, but not before we had hit the world headlines and had two TV programmes made. Mandela did rather better and Apartheid was pushed into the dustbin of History.
My other passion was using the technology of astronomy to generate new products, businesses and jobs. This programme was much more successful and I became the first physicist and first astronomer to use the new Teaching Company programme of the DTI to spin off some of the technology into industry.
In 1990 I came to Bradford University and was involved in 1997 in setting up the Department of Cybernetics with the first UK degree programme designed to educate graduates with all the skills necessary to take a small firm into the new era of e-commerce and exploit the new network technologies to deliver modern business processes.
Cybernetics has grown rapidly and now offers other degree programmes.
My research has grown and is focussed around the impact of the web for business with a programme in complexity, the impact of the web on education with a number of programmes but particularly the Bradford Robotic Telescope providing classroom astronomy for all school students, and the new grid technologies of e-science. The telescope now has three sites: www.telescope.org the International site for amateur astronomers and teacher training in developing countries. There are 23,000 users of the International site. It is the only free autonomous robotics site on the web. The http://schools.telescope.org/ a pay for site about £340 per school per annum. This has about 21,600 school children and 840 teachers all of whom are paying users within half an hours drive of the University. The telescope has delivered over 80,000 observations to its users by November 2008.

Member of the Royal Astronomical Society Education Committee

UK member of the International Astronomical Union.
Member of the International Management Committee of the Northern Hemisphere Observatory in the Canary Islands

Dan Hedges, Chris Tallon, James Machell, Scott Marley

Dan Hedges, Chris Tallon, James Machell, Margie Louws, Polly Braun-Seale