I completed my PhD. At the University of Canterbury in New Zealand in 2008 in non-radially pulsating stars and then worked my first postdoc at the Royal Observatory of Belgium under Dr Peter De Cat until the end of 2010. My next postdoc was as a Super Science Fellow with Prof Chris Tinney at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), working on exoplanets with the CYCLOPS fibre feed to the Anglo-Australian Telescopes (AAT) UCLES spectrograph. After applying for and then working on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project from 2014-2016 focused on exoplanetary science I then accepted a split 50/50 position with the Australian Astronomical Observatory and UNSW as a Lecturer and instrument scientist for the AATs UCLES and (then upcoming) Veloce spectrograph (2016-2017). At the end of 2017 I began at the University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ) as a postdoc under Prof Rob Wittenmyer working on the MINERVA-Australis telescope array and spectrograph. From October 2021 I became an Associate Professor at UniSQ.
I am currently involved in several projects mostly focusing on exoplanetary science and instrumentation:
- I am the lead scientist for UniSQs involvement in the upcoming Twinkle Space Mission
- I manage the running of the MINERVA-Australis collaboration project and the production of spectra and Doppler velocities from the data
- The NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) follow-up using MINERVA-Australis
- I manage UniSQs Mt Kent Observatory which is home to the Shared Skies Partnership, MINERVA -Australis, the Stellar Oscillation Network Group (SONG), and a node of SmartNet with The German Space Agency (DLR).
- I have varying degrees of ongoing involvement in several projects including the Veloce Spectrograph and its data analysis, the NEORA Near Earth Object catalogue project, the Fireball meteorite tracking project, the Fireball (Fuego) rapid fire detection project, the Veloce Raptor additional telescope and fibre feed for Veloce, the Antarctic Survey Telescope 3 (AST3)
- Exoplanetary Science
- Instrumentation
- Spectroscopy
Dr Wright’s publications can be viewed here