RASNZ Conference
Meet our 2025 Invited Speakers
The RASNZ conference is an annual event that brings together astronomers, astrophysicists, and other professionals in the field to discuss the latest developments and advancements in astronomy. One of the highlights of the conference is the keynote speakers who are invited to share their expertise and insights with the attendees.
Anna Scaife
Professor of Radio Astronomy at Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics
Anna is one of the five inaugural AI Fellows of the UK’s Alan Turing Institute. Previously she has worked at the University of Southampton, the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and the University of Cambridge. She has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and an undergraduate degree from the University of Bristol.
Anna is part of a team working on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio-telescope, and she led the design of the computing and storage for the European SKA Regional Centre. She is currently the UK representative to the International Union of Radio Sciences for Radio Astronomy and Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Royal Astronomical Society’s Techniques & Instruments (RASTI) journal.
In 2014, Anna was honoured by the World Economic Forum as one of thirty scientists under the age of 40 selected for their contributions to advancing the frontiers of science, engineering or technology in areas of high societal impact. In 2017 she was awarded the Blaauw Chair in Astrophysics (prize chair) at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands for excellence in research, broad knowledge of astronomy and an outstanding international status in astronomy. In 2019, Anna received the Jackson-Gwilt Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, awarded for outstanding invention, improvement, or development of astronomical instrumentation or techniques.
Rene Breton
Professor of Astrophysics at Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at The University of Manchester.
Rene Breton received his PhD in Physics from McGill University, Canada, in 2009. He is a Professor of Astrophysics at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics and is currently Deputy Head of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester.
He has held multiple prestigious grants such as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, a European Research Council Starter Grant and a GCRF Foundation Grant. His main research interests revolve around the study of pulsars, which he uses to attempt to understand matter under extreme density, gravity and magnetic fields.
Some of his past work enabled us to test ‘geodetic spin precession’ - a phenomenon predicted to exist in General Relativity - for the first time in the strong gravity environment. He is internationally known for
his research in the field ‘spider binaries’, which are very energetic millisecond pulsars that have very low-mass companions in compact orbit.
Rene also has a keen interest for science communication and has delivered hundreds of public talks (and occasional radio and television interviews) since he was a teenager. Rene’s science curiosity has led him to apply his data analysis skills for research in the area of
agriculture, more specifically to detect and map the spread of invasive plants using satellite imaging. He is also interested in image analysis for DNA research.