Richard Griffiths

Richard Griffiths is a Full Professor of Physics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he teaches astrophysics. Griffiths' research programmes are in space astronomy, especially deep surveys using earth-orbiting optical and X-ray telescopes, part of the work of observational cosmology.

The largest program that he has led is the Medium Deep Survey, a Key Project using the Hubble Space Telescope. This survey used the Wide Field Camera in serendipitous mode, taking pictures of random, unknown areas of sky while the telescope was simultaneously collecting data from known targets using other instruments. The images of tens of thousands of galaxies have been used to unravel the origin and evolution of galaxies, from giants like the Milky Way to the much more numerous dwarf galaxies. He has been putting constraints on cosmological parameters, as well as measuring the evolution of different galaxy types. With his research group, he is also finding strong gravitational lenses, and measuring the frequency of galaxy mergers. Before working on the Hubble Space Telescope project, Griffiths' background was in the field of X-ray astronomy, and he now continues to work on the origin of the X-ray background from space, using data in the form of deep images taken with earth-orbiting X-ray telescopes. He has found that the X-ray background has its origin in quasars and other active galactic nuclei, and some of it originates in starburst galaxies. With images from these satellites, he plans to use SALT to identify the kinds of galaxies which are the greatest producers of X-rays.

Griffiths is a graduate of Imperial College London and the University of Leicester (Ph.D. 1972). He has worked in the USA since 1976, initially at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for astrophysics, thenat the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University, and moved to a tenured faculty position at Carnegie Mellon University in 1996.