Thank you… more than 15 years of being excited about Rubin for me and the same for Catherine Heymans being a total inspiration! Hope I was able to channel even a morsel of your usual enthusiasm and flair. As always you continue to lift others up with you and open up opportunities for us all.

Thank you VISTA for 15 years of incredible science! Very fortunate to now also be heavily involved in the next adventures for this telescope as the infrared camera makes way for a brand new spectrograph that will enable yet another step change in survey astronomy over the next decade

And with my current research team at Southampton we are creating a unique legacy dataset combining VISTA survey data with other astronomical surveys. This is one of the UK’s in-kind contributions to the Vera Rubin Observatory earning UK scientists data rights on this amazing new facility

VISTA featured heavily in the research proposals that earned me my two independent long-term fellowships marking my transition from a postdoctoral researcher to a research team leader

I then had the opportunity to lead my own large public survey with VISTA spanning 3 years (including over the pandemic) and involving hundreds of international collaborators from all around the globe

The amazing data we got enabled my most exciting scientific discoveries - hidden quasars, rapidly growing supermassive black holes that are enshrouded in dust and that appeared to be far more numerous than we had previously imagined

My first postdoctoral position began as the telescope saw first light. I was responsible for planning and executing the largest all-sky infrared survey to be conducted with VIRCam

The first paper from my PhD forecasted how the near infrared camera about to go on the telescope (VIRCam) would improve our ability to measure distances to galaxies based on their colours

Agreed! That’s why I usually schedule send at random times rather than first thing on Monday morning. 😊 I also do this more with professional services staff I work a lot with and less with academic colleagues as email culture seems to be quite different for the two communities