Rate My Professor James Miller Jones

Professor James Miller-Jones is a Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering, Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Curtin University, where he also serves as Director of Science for the Curtin node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). He obtained his DPhil in Astrophysics from the University of Oxford. After completing his doctoral studies, he held a postdoctoral position at the Astronomical Institute Anton Pannekoek, University of Amsterdam, from October 2004 to August 2007. He then served as a Jansky Fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville for three years before joining ICRAR-Curtin as a Curtin Research Fellow in July 2010. In 2014, he was awarded an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship to investigate low-luminosity accretion onto stellar-mass black holes. He assumed the role of Science Director at ICRAR-Curtin in 2017 and was promoted to Professor in 2019.

His research focuses on relativistic jets from accreting stellar-mass compact objects, including black holes and neutron stars in X-ray binaries, utilizing multi-wavelength observations with premier radio telescopes worldwide alongside X-ray, optical, and other instruments. Notable publications include 'A rapidly changing jet orientation in the stellar-mass black-hole system V404 Cyg' (Nature, 2019) and 'Cygnus X-1 contains a 21-solar mass black hole' (Science, 2021). With over 16,000 citations across more than 420 publications, his work elucidates jet launching mechanisms and their influence on surrounding environments, bridging to supermassive black hole studies. He received the Western Australian Young Tall Poppy Science Awards in 2013 and 2014 for his contributions to research and public communication of science. Ongoing and future efforts exploit facilities such as the Square Kilometre Array, Murchison Widefield Array, and MeerKAT to probe jet-producing radio transients in detail.