Dr Jason Kirk

As the Foundation Year Tutor, Jason helps students monitor their own engagement and delivers course-specific study skills training. His teaching includes modern physics for the Foundation Year students and digital skills for online learning students. He also helps supervise astronomy experiments in the third-year laboratory and acts as a supervisor of BSc (Hons) projects on the DL and on-campus degrees (topics including GAIA astrometry and the orbits of solar system objects).

Jason's published research work focuses on the dense cores of interstellar clouds where stars form. This is largely based upon surveys of these clouds in nearby complexes and galaxies. This involves observations from telescopes operating in the far-infrared (Spitzer/Hershel) and submillimeter (JCMT/ALMA) regimes.

Jason was an undergraduate and postgraduate student at Cardiff University. After graduation, he spent three years working at the University of Urbana-Champaign in Illinois, USA as a postdoc working on interferometric studies of star formation with the BIMA array. He then returned to Cardiff as a postdoc in 2005 to work on the development and definition of the Spitzer and Herschel Gould Belt Surveys. Jason started working for UCLan in 2012. He helped develop the physics foundation year which was first taught in 2013-14.