Professor Katherine Blundell OBE

Professor Katherine Blundell OBE is Research Fellow at St John's College, and a Professor of Astrophysics.

In 2005, she won a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Astronomy & Astrophysics. She was awarded the Royal Society's Rosalind Franklin prize in 2010, and the Institute of Physics Bragg Medal in 2012. In 2017 she was a Distinguished Visitor at the Australian Astronomical Observatory and was appointed OBE by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for services to astronomy and the education of young people. In 2019 she was appointed the 38th Gresham Professor of Astronomy. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has named Minor Planet 31006 Katherine after her.

Professor Blundell is Founder and Director of the Global Jet Watch, a round-the-world network of research-grade telescopes specially designed to study the activity in the dynamic night sky.

She authored, together with Professor Stephen Blundell, a textbook, Concepts in Thermal Physics, which is used worldwide. This book covers kinetic theory, thermodynamics, statistical mechanics and applications in astrophysics, atmospheric physics, information theory, and many other topics.

In the Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction series, Professor Blundell has also written a book on Black Holes.

My research interests include the physics of active galaxies, such as quasars; the formation of these objects at early times and their lifecycles. I am interested in the distributions of these objects throughout cosmic time and space. I am also studying black hole systems in our own Galaxy which squirt out plasma that moves almost as fast as the speed of light, termed microquasars which resemble distant quasars, albeit evolving on much faster timescales.

My research work on extreme sources of energy in the Universe gives a certain perspective on the challenge of the energy problem to be solved on Earth. My chemistry colleague Professor Fraser Armstrong and I organised a one-day forum to celebrate the 450th anniversary of St John's College entitled 'Energy... beyond Oil', which resulted in a book of the same title published with Oxford University Press. In 2006, we co-organised a Discussion Meeting at the Royal Society on 'Energy... for the Future'.