Personal Story
Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue68 1–30 November 2025
I was born in Newcastle Upon Tyne, a city in the north-east of England. Newcastle is a working class city and people from Newcastle, called 'Geordies', are known for being welcoming, affable, and hard-working. I hope I'm no exception! I enjoy running but I love football, and have been a fan of Newcastle United for as long as I can remember. Outside of sport, I am a big fan of puzzles, like sudoku and cryptic crosswords, and when I can spare the time I enjoy playing video games too. In 2007 my family emigrated to Perth in Western Australia, seeking better opportunities for my younger sister and I.
I always had an interest in mathematics, and it was something I was adept in from a young age. I enjoyed the process of encountering difficult problems and discovering how to answer them, and this thought process followed me into university. I enrolled at the University of Western Australia (UWA) in 2012 in a Bachelor of Science, majoring in Physics. In my mind, the physical sciences were the best place for me to keep finding these difficult questions that I could try to answer. As part of my undergraduate degree we were exposed to many different areas of physics, and I was immediately interested in astronomy in a way that the other areas of physics didn't quite capture me.
When I finished my Bachelors I stayed at UWA to undertake a Masters degree in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research. During my Masters I worked with the Galaxy and Mass Assembly team to identify a rare class of galaxies, called low-surface brightness galaxies, in archival data and see if they had an appreciable impact on the total galaxy stellar mass function, a key tool used in understanding the stellar evolution of galaxies. As it turns out these galaxies are a lot rarer than we thought, and I barely found anything!
During my Masters I gained an appreciation for cosmology, and the big picture questions about the universe that cosmologists were trying to solve. This immediately appealed to me and I decided to pursue a PhD in cosmology. This led me to Melbourne, where I joined the Centre of Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology. At Swinburne I harnessed the statistical power of galaxy motions in order to better understand how structures form in the universe, and to test our fundamental assumptions about gravity and general relativity. During my time at Swinburne I also became interested in how we can use gravitational waves to measure the expansion rate of the universe.
I was lucky enough to obtain a Postdoctoral position at Swinburne once I completed my PhD, continuing my work in cosmology and becoming a key member of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument collaboration. As part of the DESI team, I have access to the largest galaxy velocity datasets in order to produce the tightest constraints on the growth of large-scale structure possible. During this position I also became a member of the 4MOST Hemisphere Survey and the OzGrav Centre for Gravitaitonal Wave Research.
In my postdoctoral position here at RSAA I'll be helping the 4HS team as they begin observations of galaxies across the Southern sky, and further developing the statistical tools I began working on at Swinburne in order to continue answering the biggest questions in cosmology.
I'm excited to start this chapter of my career and to learn all I can from the many experts at RSAA!
Ryan Turner
