When Richard Easther was a high school student in Hamilton in the early 1980s he built a wooden mount for his telescope on his parent’s lawn outside Hamilton.  These days Richard works on developing connections between New Zealand and global science collaborations.  It might look like there is a straight line between these two things but it has been a curved and complex path.

Richard moved to Christchurch to study astronomy as an undergraduate, and eventually left Canterbury with a PhD in physics in 1994. From there he went to research positions in Japan and the United States, before spending eight years on the faculty at Yale University. He moved home with his family at the end of 2011, to take up a professorship in physics at the University of Auckland.

As a scientist, Richard works to understand how the universe evolves from the Big Bang through to the present day. To do this, he uses ideas in theoretical physics, computer simulations and observations of the sky to develop new approaches to testing theories of the very early universe. He suspects his five year old self would be pretty happy to learn how things have turned out.