René Liseau new professor at Chalmers

Left: A whirling disc of gas and dust around the star beta Pictoris on the southern sky, depicted at a wavelength of 1.2 mm. Credit: René Liseau , SEST-SIMBA. Right: René Liseau together with an earlier version of the future space mission Darwin, designed to help search for life in the universe. Credit: ESA / René Liesau.

In August 2007, René Liseau, professor at Stockholm Observatory, will take up his new professorship in radio astronomy at Chalmers Technological University in Gothenburg, Sweden. The activity will mainly be situated at Onsala Space Observatory on Råö, south of Gothenburg. His new professorship at Chalmers is an acknowledgement for successful research.

René Liseau has been working at Stockholm Observatory for more than ten years and been a professor in astronomical space science since 2002. He has for a long time and with great enthusiasm been invovled in a number of international space projects. To the extent he has been stationed in Sweden, his involvement has focused on projects with preferably Swedish connection, such as Odin and Herschel.

Since the beginning of the 90´s, René Liseau has been involved in the astrobiological future vision Darwin, as well as its American cousin TPF (Terrestrial Planet Finder), with an aim to launch into space before the end of the next decade. He has organized the first international Darwin conference in Stockholm and was one of the initiators to the graduate school in astrobiology at Stockholm University.

His research is mainly focused on the understanding of the processes that lead to the formation of new stars and their planetary systems (see e.g. the previous news items "Extremely fast jets from newborn stars" and "Comet cloud in the making discovered"). His observational field of activity ranges across the whole electromagnetic spectrum, but with stress on the low energy- and molecular astrophysics.