Rate My Professor Adam Deller

Professor Adam Deller is Professor of Astrophysics in the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology, part of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He holds a PhD in Astrophysics from Swinburne University of Technology, awarded in 2009 along with the Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies prize for the best PhD thesis. Deller completed his undergraduate studies in electronic engineering at Swinburne. Prior to his appointment at Swinburne, he conducted postdoctoral research at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in the United States.

Deller's research centers on the physics of compact objects, including neutron stars and black holes, using radio telescope observations. His investigations cover fast radio bursts (FRBs) to explore their origins and use them as probes of the intergalactic medium, radio pulsars, neutron stars in X-ray binaries, and radio active galactic nuclei, employing very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) for high-resolution astrometry and precise parallax-based distance measurements. He developed the DiFX distributed correlator software, implemented on commodity computing hardware and adopted worldwide by major radio astronomy facilities, enabling advanced signal processing. This has supported key achievements such as precise neutron star localizations and imaging the radio afterglow of a neutron star merger detected via gravitational waves. Deller participates in Square Kilometre Array (SKA) working groups and serves as an ARC Future Fellow. In 2020, he received the Pawsey Medal from the Australian Academy of Science for outstanding contributions to physics by an early- to mid-career researcher.