Professor Donald Kurtz

Don has dual British and American citizenship and is now Extra-ordinary Professor at North-West University in South Africa, Professor Emeritus of Astrophysics at the University of Central Lancashire, and Visiting Professor at the University of Lincoln. He holds an A-1 research rating from the South African National Research Foundation, its highest rating.

He is a past councillor and vice-president of the Royal Astronomical Society, and was awarded the Society’s 2022 Service Award for a lifetime of service and outreach. He is frequently invited to speak internationally to both professional astronomers and to the public. Don has observed with some of the largest telescopes in the world, and now works primarily with data from the Space Missions Kepler and TESS. He has over 500 professional publications and is the discoverer of a class of pulsating, magnetic stars that are the most peculiar stars known. He is co-author of the fundamental textbook “Asteroseismology”, and author of a major review in 2022 of Asteroseismology in the journal Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He is an outdoorsman and has travelled widely. Don enthusiastically gives many dozens of public lectures per year to diverse audiences all over the world on a wide range of topics. He divides his time between the UK and South Africa.