Ryan Cooke

Ryan Cooke was born in 1986 in Gold Coast, Australia. His mother was a reception (kindergarten) teacher, and his father was a house builder. “I enjoyed a range of science subjects when I was young,” Cooke says, “and then my grandfather gave me a telescope when I was a teenager. My first close-up views of Saturn and Jupiter stunned me!”  Cooke pursued several part-time jobs during his undergraduate degree, including a supermarket cashier, a picture-framer, a job working with puzzles, digital camera sales, and the occasional stint on his dad’s building site. But working as a professional astronomer was always the end goal, ever since he discovered this was a potential career path.

As an undergraduate Cooke attended the Queensland University of Technology, which was a two-hour commute each way. He received his master’s from the University of Sydney, then moved to the U.K. to pursue his doctorate at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, where his advisor was Max Pettini, with whom he forged the collaboration that led to their Gruber Prize. He received his PhD in astrophysics in 2011. He spent the following year as a Junior Research Fellow of Peterhouse at Cambridge University, then moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz, for four years, first as a Morrison Postdoctoral Fellow, then as a NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow. Since 2016 he has been a professor and Royal Society University Research Fellow at Durham University in the UK. He is married to Alis Deason, a fellow astronomer, and they are orbited by two cosmic children. 

Among the honors Cooke has received are a Royal Astronomical Society Michael Penston Prize (which annually recognizes “the best doctoral thesis in astronomy or astrophysics” in the UK). He has also been the recipient of several awards and grants from the Royal Society.