Roland Bacon, CNRS Emeritus Research Director at CRAL, is awarded the EAS 2024 Lodewijk Woltjer Lecture.
The Lodewijk Woltjer Lecture, awarded by the European Astronomical Society (EAS), honours astronomers of outstanding scientific distinction.
The 2024 Lodewijk Woltjer Lecture is awarded to Roland Bacon for the development of integral field spectroscopy as a core technique in observational astrophysics and its application to a wide range of problems, in particular galaxy evolution.
CNRS Emeritus Research Director, Roland Bacon is a member of the Lyon Astrophysics Research Center (CRAL). He started his career in extragalactic astronomy developing kinematic models of elliptical galaxies. He has developed a number of spectroscopic instruments, including MUSE (Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explore), a highly innovative integral field spectrograph developed in the 2000s and still in use today on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
Roland Bacon is now leading a community effort to develop an innovative 10-m class wide-field telescope, combining a wide-field telescope with a huge integral field spectrograph.
Notably, a CRAL member, Isabelle Baraffe, has already received the Lodewijk Woltjer Lecture in 2023.