People

Dr. Dominic Bowman

Background

Dr. Dominic Bowman was born in the United Kingdom and holds both British and Irish citizenship. He completed his MSci (Hons) Physics and Astrophysics degree at the University of Birmingham (Sept 2009 - July 2013), and obtained his PhD in Astronomy from the Jeremiah Horrocks Institute of the University of Central Lancashire (Oct 2013 - Nov 2016), which was funded by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). In February 2017, he moved to Leuven in Belgium to become a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Conny Aerts at the Institute of Astronomy, KU Leuven, Belgium (Feb 2017 - Oct 2020). In November 2020 he obtained a competitive FWO senior postdoctoral research fellowship also based at KU Leuven (Nov 2020 - Aug 2023). Since September 2023, Dominic holds a Readership Faculty position and a prestigous Royal Society University Research Fellowship (URF) in the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Physics at Newcastle University in the UK, where he implements his UKRI Frontier Research Grant: SYMPHONY.

Research Network

Dominic is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (FRAS), a Member of the Institute of Physics (MInstP), a member of the European Astronomical Society (EAS) and a junior member of the International Astronomical Union (IAU). These professional organisations provide valuable networking opportunities with other researchers in physics and astronomy. They also organise scientific meetings, training and mentoring workshops, which improve communication, outreach and career prospects, and allow attendees to pass their knowledge and experience onto others. Dominic currently holds leading roles in several international consortia focussed on various astrophysical aspects of massive stars, including:

  • MOBSTER: Detection, characterisation and understanding of magnetic fields in early-type stars
  • CubeSpec: in-orbit proof-of-concept for spectroscopy with a cubesat and facilitating massive star asteroseismology from spectroscopic line profile variability
  • XShootU: UV, visible and infrared spectroscopy of massive stars at low metallicity
  • BEST: coordination of the BRITE-Constellation network of cubesats assembling time-series photometry of bright stars
  • Arago: candidate mission for M7 ESA call; chair of the 'Hot BA star' working group

Research Interests

Dominic's main research interests in astronomy include asteroseismology, which is the study of stellar interiors from their oscillations. The detection of stellar oscillation frequencies comes from telescopes that capture changes in the surface brightness of stars allowing us to probe the physics of stellar structure and evolution. The ultimate goal of asteroseismology is to improve our understanding of the interior physical conditions and processes for a diverse range of stars. The quality of space observations, such as from the CoRoT, Kepler/K2 and TESS space telescopes, provide an excellent opportunity to study physics that is not currently well understood for massive stars.

Dominic is the PI of the SYMPHONY project using asteroseismology to understand massive pulsating stars known as Blue Supergiants, which is funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) in the form of a Frontier Research grant under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee (grant agreement number: EP/Y031059/1).

Personal Website: 

https://dbowman234.github.io/