Professor Matthew Bailes

Professor Matthew Bailes is an Australian Laureate Fellow at Swinburne University of Technology, and the leader of the Dynamic Universe theme of the ARC Centre of Excellence for all-sky astrophysics, CAASTRO.  In 1998 he founded the Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, which specialises in problems in astronomy that demand high performance computing. It is now home to some 80 research staff and PhD students.

Professor Bailes' team designs and deploys supercomputers for the world's largest radio telescopes, and these are used to discover some of the most extreme objects in the Universe. With his collaborators he recently discovered that every day the earth is struck by 1000s of millisecond duration bursts of radio emission from the distant universe, from a mysterious new class of cosmic explosion that is one of the hottest topics in astrophysics.  Under his leadership Swinburne University adapted their interest in 3D visualisation to develop some of the first educational 3D films about astronomy. Recently this culminated in the creation of Australia's first 3D IMAX film, Hidden Universe 3D.

He completed his PhD at ANU in 1990 with the thesis The Origin of Pulsar Velocities.