Warrick Couch

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Warrick John Couch (born 1954) is an Australian astronomer and professor at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. He has led major astronomy programs, including as director of the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO), and has served as president of the Australian Institute of Physics (2015–2017). He helped start Astronomy Australia Limited and sits on the board of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization.

His research studies how galaxies form and change over time, especially how their environment influences them. He has worked with many big telescopes on Earth and in space, such as Hubble and Chandra, and has contributed to big projects that map galaxies and reveal the universe’s accelerating expansion due to dark energy. He helped discover ultra-compact dwarf galaxies and studied how the Andromeda Galaxy affects its neighbor M32.

Education and early life: He was born in Lower Hutt, New Zealand. He studied physics at Victoria University of Wellington (BSc Hons 1976; MSc 1977) and earned a PhD in astrophysics from ANU in 1982, researching the colors of galaxies in clusters and the Butcher–Oemler effect. He then did a postdoc at the University of Durham, where he helped develop the first optical fibre multi-object spectrograph for the AAT. He returned to Australia for a National Research Fellowship at the Anglo-Australian Observatory in 1985, during which CCD imaging improved distant cluster studies.

Career highlights: In 1989 he became a lecturer at UNSW and later headed the School of Physics. In 2006 he moved to Swinburne University, helping the group gain access to the Keck telescopes. In 2013 he became director of the AAO, guiding the organization through the Siding Spring operations and bushfire recovery. In 2018 he returned to Swinburne as a professor in astrophysics and supercomputing.

Publications and recognition: Couch is a highly cited researcher with hundreds of papers. He played a major role in the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey and the WiggleZ project that provided evidence for dark energy. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Personal life: His wife, Maryanne Mooney, died in 2014. They had three children: Philip, Josh, and Anna. In his spare time, he enjoys cricket and rugby (the All Blacks), music, travel, and home renovation.