ProfessorJulia Bryant

Professor Bryant received her PhD in astrophysics from the University of Sydney in 2001 with a thesis titled "The nuclear environment of radio galaxy hosts". She has since held research positions in the University of Sydney in areas of high redshift radio galaxies, galaxy evolution and astrophotonic developments for astronomical instrumentation.

She is Director of Astralis-USyd, one of 3 nodes of Australia's Astronomical Instrumentation Consortium (the other two nodes are at MQ andANU). Astralis-USyd develops photonic and fibre devices to improve astronomical instrumentation and builds instruments for the world's largest telescopes.

She is a CI of the ARC Centre of Excellence ASTRO-3D.

Bryant has led the team that developed new optical imaging fibre bundles (hexabundles) for the SAMI instrument on the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT). This new technology enabled the first large integral field spectroscopy survey of nearby galaxies (effectively galaxies in 3D).

She leads the Hector project (Hector Instrument team and Hector Galaxy Survey). Hector is a new integral-field instrument for the AAT, but bigger and better than SAMI. It is now carrying out a survey of 15,000 galaxies (from 2023-2028), with the benefit of a larger view of each galaxy and higher spectral resolution to reveal the complex physics and dynamics of galaxies.