Ralph E Pudritz

Biography

He is a theoretical astrophysicist and his research focuses on star and planet formation. He completed his undergraduate studies at UBC in mathematics and physics. He then moved to the University of Toronto for his M. Sc. (in theoretical physics). He returned to UBC to do his Ph.D. in astrophysics under the supervision of Greg Fahlman, completing it in 1980. He took up an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge (England). He went on to further postdoctoral research with Chris McKee and Jon Arons at the Astronomy Dept. at Berkeley, and with Colin Norman at the Johns Hopkins University. He joined the faculty at McMaster in 1986. Research Leaves and Fellowships over the subsequent years have taken him to many outstanding research centres including the Observatoire de Grenoble (1988, 1992), the Max-Planck Inst. for Astronomy in Heidelberg (1993), the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (1993), the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Munich (1997), the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) in Toronto (1990 and 1997), Caltech (2001), and the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) in Santa Barbara (2007/08).

Research Interest

He is fascinated by the questions of how stars and planets form - arguably two of the most exciting and still largely unsolved major problems in contemporary astrophysics.