Robert Simpson

Hey, I'm Rob

Astrophysicist turned product person. I like building things, looking at the sky, and making stuff with code.

LinkedIn Instagram GitHub Google Scholar .Astronomy Project Possibility

I'm Rob Simpson. I live in Milton Keynes with my family. By day I'm Head of Product at Spaceflux, where we track satellites with a network of optical telescopes around the world. Before that I was a product manager at Google, and before that I spent years at the University of Oxford helping run Zooniverse, the world's largest citizen science platform, where over a million people help with real scientific research.

Originally though, I'm an astrophysicist. I did my degree and PhD at Cardiff University, studying how stars form from clouds of gas and dust. I spent a lot of time staring at data from the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, which sounds glamorous but mostly involved sitting in a cold office in Wales. I was also a TED Fellow in 2014, which was a pretty wild experience.

Things I've started

.Astronomy

Back in 2008, while I was still doing my PhD, I started a conference called .Astronomy (pronounced "dot astronomy"). The idea was simple: get astronomers, coders, educators, and communicators in a room together and see what happens when they hack on projects and share ideas about using the web for science. It's been running ever since. 14 editions across Cardiff, Leiden, Oxford, Heidelberg, Chicago, Sydney, Cape Town, Baltimore, Toronto, New York, Madrid, and more. I'm really proud of the community it's built and the people who've helped make it happen over the years.

Project Possibility

In 2024 I founded Project Possibility, a charity here in Milton Keynes. We run events to help young people believe in themselves through science, tech, and the arts. Projects so far include Classtronauts (space science in schools), a community library, movie screenings, and The Great Toy Race, where we drove a toy car 17.7 miles around Milton Keynes to raise funds. It was as ridiculous and fun as it sounds.

Other stuff I do (or have done)

  • Chromoscope - A thing I built with Stuart Lowe and Chris North that lets you explore the Milky Way across different wavelengths of light. We originally made it for a Royal Society exhibition in 2009 and it took on a life of its own.
  • Puddleford - I perform in this entirely improvised audio drama podcast with Milton Keynes Theatre of Comedy. It's set in a fictional English town and we improvise 30-minute comedy plays spanning British history. It's a lot of fun and frequently chaotic.
  • Recycled Electrons - An astronomy podcast I co-hosted with Chris Lintott while we were both at Oxford. We made over 130 episodes covering space news, citizen science, and a fair amount of nonsense.
  • HC Productions - A production company I started at university. We took two shows to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2005.
  • The Fourth Chair - An improv comedy group I co-founded at Cardiff, performing in pubs and bars around the city. My first taste of making things up on stage.

The academic bit

If you're interested in the formal stuff: I have a PhD in astrophysics, my papers have been cited over 2,000 times (Google Scholar), and my research covered star formation, citizen science, and web-based astronomy tools. Here are some 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).