Professor James Hough
BSc PhD FRAS CPhys FInstP
Job title: Director of Astronomy Research
Email Address: J.H.Hough@herts.ac.uk
Memberships and Appointments: Hough has played a major role in the peer review process and the strategic development of astronomy within the UK, being a Member or Chair of over 35 Research Council Committees or Boards, and in 1995-1996 he chaired a major review of UK astronomy culminating in two reports: Hough I and Hough II, which set the scientific strategy and the infrastructure needs for the future UK astronomy programme. He was appointed to the Particle Physics and Astronomy Council between 1997-2000 and chair of the PPARC Education and Training Panel between 1998 and 2001. He is co-signatory of the Memorandum of Understanding for UK-Japanese Co-operation in Ground-Based Astronomy and is a UK member of the Japanese -UK Board overseeing the collaborative programmes. He is presently a member of the Isaac Newton Group Board, chairs the oversight committee for the JWST MIRI instrument and is an elected member of Council of the Royal Astronomical Society.
James Hough is responsible for the development of astronomy research at Hertfordshire. The Centre for Astrophysics Research is one of the largest in the UK and covers a wide range of astronomy including the formation and evolution of galaxies, star formation and evolution, brown dwarfs and exoplanets.
After obtaining his PhD, on pion-proton interactions, Hough studied the radio emission from Extensive Air Showers at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory, Penticton, Canada. He was awarded a Science & Engineering Research Council Resettlement Research Fellowship at Durham University and joined the then Hatfield Polytechnic, now the University of Hertfordshire, in September 1972.
Hough has designed and constructed a number of private astronomical polarimeters used at major observatories around the world and provided polarimetry for a number of facility optical and near-infrared imagers and spectrometers at the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope, Hawaii, and the Anglo-Australian Observatory, NSW. He was Project Scientist for the construction of polarimeters for the international Gemini Project and is part of the science team for CanariCam, a mid-infrared imager-spectrometer with polarimetry, being built at the University of Florida for the GranTeCan telescope on La Palma. He led the development at Hertfordshire of PlanetPol, a polarimeter with a sensitivity for fractional polarization of better than 1 part in a million, designed to detect the reflected light from exoplanets.
With researchers from the Centre for Atmospheric & Instrumentation Research (CAIR), Hough is developing a new laboratory designed to study the scattering of light, including non-linear processes, from biological particles