Rate My Professor Justyn Maund

Justyn Maund is Senior Lecturer in Physics and Undergraduate Admissions Tutor in the Department of Physics at Royal Holloway, University of London, a position he assumed in 2023. He is a member of the Astronomy research group, where his focus is supernovae. Maund obtained his PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Cambridge in 2005, with a thesis titled "The progenitors of core-collapse supernovae." Prior to Royal Holloway, he served as Royal Society University Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield's Department of Physics and Astronomy. He previously held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at Queen's University Belfast. Graduating from Trinity College, Cambridge, Maund has conducted research spanning over two decades on stellar evolution, supernovae explosions, their role in heavy element formation, and using these events to probe universe dynamics. His observational work utilizes instruments on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope, alongside extensive experience in optical astronomy.

Maund's key publications include "Signatures of the Shock Interaction as an Additional Power Source in the Nebular Spectra of SN 2023ixf" (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2025, with Amit Kumar et al.), "Exclusion of a Direct Progenitor Detection for the Type Ic SN 2017ein Based on Late-time Observations" (Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2025, with Y. H. Zhao et al.), and "Exploring the polarization of axially symmetric supernovae with unsupervised deep learning" (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2024). He contributed to the highly cited "The death of massive stars–I. Observational constraints on the progenitors of Type II-P supernovae" (Smartt et al., Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society). As principal investigator, he transferred the STFC project "A consolidated grant for Sheffield Astrophysics 2021-2024" to Royal Holloway. Maund supervises PhD students, including on machine learning for studying supernovae, and delivers seminars such as "The polarization of exploding stars." His research advances knowledge of supernova geometries, shock breakouts, and progenitor identifications, internationally recognized for groundbreaking contributions to astrophysics.