Robert Simpson

Astrophysicist, product leader, charity founder and recently AI enthusiast.

Robert J. Simpson is a British astrophysicist, product leader, and science communicator who has spent two decades working at the intersection of science, technology, and community. He is the founder of the .Astronomy conference series, a former operations lead at Zooniverse (the world's largest citizen science platform), a former product manager at Google, and currently Head of Product at Spaceflux, where he works on optical satellite tracking and Space Domain Awareness. He lives in Milton Keynes, UK with his family.

Education

Simpson studied astrophysics at Cardiff University, graduating with an MPhys in 2004. During his undergraduate years he led the university's Drama Society, Act1. Subsequently he started a production company, HC Productions, taking two shows to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2005. He was also a founding member of The Fourth Chair, an improv comedy group performing in Cardiff pubs and bars.

He returned to Cardiff in 2006 for doctoral research under the supervision of Prof. Derek Ward-Thompson. His PhD focused on the evolution of prestellar cores in the Rho Ophiuchi (L1688) star-forming region, using submillimetre observations from the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii. His thesis work produced a widely-cited paper on the prestellar core mass function, establishing an observational framework for understanding how stars begin to form from collapsing clouds of gas and dust. He completed his PhD in 2010.

Career

.Astronomy

In 2008, while still a PhD student at Cardiff, Simpson founded .Astronomy (pronounced "dot astronomy"), a conference series bringing together astronomers, educators, developers, and communicators to explore how the internet and web technologies could be used in astronomy research, outreach, and education.

.Astronomy pioneered the "hack day" format in astronomy conferences, where participants collaborate on day-long projects, and introduced "unconference" sessions with topics proposed and voted on by attendees. The format proved influential: hack days were subsequently adopted at American Astronomical Society (AAS) meetings and influenced conference design across the field.

Fourteen editions of the conference have been held since 2008:

Surveys of participants found that 90% reported gaining new ideas and inspiration, 67% said the conference impacted their day-to-day work, and around 70% felt it may have influenced their career trajectory. The .Astronomy "Brain Trust" of organisers has included notable figures such as Chris Lintott (Oxford), Sarah Kendrew (ESA/JWST), Amanda Bauer (Yerkes Observatory), Becky Smethurst (Oxford / Dr Becky on YouTube), Arfon Smith (GitHub / JOSS), Alasdair Allan (Raspberry Pi / IoT), and the late Carolina Ödman-Govender (University of the Western Cape).

Project Possibility

In 2024, Simpson founded Project Possibility, a UK registered charity (number 1205365) based in Milton Keynes. The charity's mission is to help young people believe in themselves and each other by organising inspiring events that promote a healthy belief in the impossible through science, technology, and the arts.

Project Possibility runs events designed to give young people the opportunity to discover their passions, develop their skills, and build a lasting belief that the future is wide open to them. Projects include Classtronauts (bringing space science into schools), Community Library, Movie Time, and the Fire & Ice fundraising challenge. In 2024, the charity also organised The Great Toy Race, driving a toy car 17.7 miles around Milton Keynes to raise funds and awareness.

Other projects

Chromoscope

Simpson co-created Chromoscope with Stuart Lowe and Chris North, an interactive web-based tool that lets users explore the Milky Way across multiple wavelengths, from gamma-ray to radio. Originally built for the Planck/Herschel Royal Society Summer Exhibition in 2009, it became an open-source educational tool for exploring the electromagnetic spectrum of our galaxy.

Puddleford

Simpson is a performer in Puddleford, an entirely improvised episodic audio drama from Milton Keynes Theatre of Comedy. Set in the fictional English town of Puddleford, the podcast features 30-minute improvised comedy plays spanning British history, from the 1790s to the present day.

Recycled Electrons

During his time at Oxford, Simpson co-hosted Recycled Electrons, an astronomy and science podcast recorded with Chris Lintott. The show ran for over 130 episodes, covering space news, citizen science, and general nonsense from "the finest land available" in Oxford.

TED Fellowship

In 2014, Simpson was selected as a TED Fellow, speaking at TED2014 in Vancouver about citizen science and the Zooniverse platform. He discussed how over one million volunteers were contributing to real scientific research, and how crowdsourcing was producing discoveries that automated systems alone could not achieve.

Research and publications

Simpson's academic work spans observational star formation, citizen science methodology, and the intersection of web technology with astronomical research. His publications have been cited over 2,000 times (Google Scholar, h-index 13).

Selected publications, ordered by citations:

• Willett, K.W., Lintott, C.J., Bamford, S.P. et al. including Simpson (2013). "Galaxy Zoo 2: detailed morphological classifications for 304,122 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey." MNRAS, 435(4), 2835. [~900 citations]
• Simpson, R.J. et al. (2012). "The Milky Way Project First Data Release: A Bubblier Galactic Disc." MNRAS, 424(4), 2442. [~258 citations]
• Ward-Thompson, D., Di Francesco, J., Hatchell, J. et al. including Simpson (2007). "The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope Legacy Survey of Nearby Star-forming Regions in the Gould Belt." PASP, 119(858), 855. [~202 citations]
• Fischer, D.A., Schwamb, M.E. et al. including Simpson (2012). "Planet Hunters: the first two planet candidates identified by the public using the Kepler public archive data." MNRAS, 419(4), 2900. [~160 citations]
• Shamir, L., Yerby, C., Simpson, R. et al. (2014). "Classification of large acoustic datasets using machine learning and crowdsourcing: Application to whale calls." J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 135(2), 953. [~135 citations]
• Kendrew, S., Simpson, R.J. et al. (2012). "The Milky Way Project: A statistical study of massive star formation associated with infrared bubbles." ApJ, 755(1), 71. [~124 citations]
• Buckle, J.V., Curtis, E.I. et al. including Simpson (2010). "The JCMT Legacy Survey of the Gould Belt: a first look at Orion B with HARP." MNRAS, 401(1), 204. [~104 citations]
• Simpson, R.J., Nutter, D., Ward-Thompson, D. (2008). "An observational study of the Ophiuchus cloud L1688 and implications for the pre-stellar core mass function." MNRAS, 391(1), 205. [~78 citations]
• Schwamb, M.E., Lintott, C.J. et al. including Simpson (2012). "Planet Hunters: Assessing the Kepler Inventory of Short-period Planets." ApJ, 754(2), 129. [~65 citations]
• Simpson, R.J. et al. (2011). "An evolutionary diagram for pre-stellar cores." MNRAS, 417(1), 216. [~23 citations]
• Kendrew, S., Simpson, R.J. et al. (2020). "Ten Years of .Astronomy: Scientific and Cultural Impact." Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 51(4).