| 1 | Name: | Dr. Bernard Fanaroff | |
| Institution: | Square Kilometre Array South Africa; South African Radio Astronomy Observatory Project | ||
| Year Elected: | 2022 | ||
| Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | ||
| Residency: | International | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1947 | ||
Bernie Fanaroff was the Director of the South African Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Radio Telescope Project from its initiation in 2003 until 2015. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and a Founder Member of the Academy of Science of South Africa. He has been awarded the South African national Order of Mapungubwe, the Karl Jansky Lectureship of Associated Universities Inc and the NRAO, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Research Foundation, the Science for Society Gold Medal of the Academy of Science of South Africa and several honorary degrees. He was a Visiting Professor at Oxford University. He has a BSc Honours degree in physics from the University of the Witwatersrand and a PhD in radio astronomy from Cambridge University. During his PhD he published the Fanaroff-Riley classification of radio galaxy and quasar morphology with fellow student Julia Riley, which continues to be a basic classification of the jets which carry energy away from the accretion disks surrounding super-massive black holes in the centres of most galaxies. He left academia in 1976 to become a national organizer in South Africa of the nascent Metal and Allied Workers Union, one of the new non-racial unions then being organized in opposition to the legally-recognised unions which excluded Black workers, who had no rights under apartheid. He became a national secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa in 1987. When Nelson Mandela became President after the first democratic election in 1994, he became Deputy Director General in the Office of the President and Head of the Office for the Reconstruction and Development Programme, government’s central programme to build the country after apartheid. He became Deputy Director General of the Secretariat for Safety and Security in 1997 and chaired the Integrated Justice System Board and the Inter-Departmental Committee for Border Control. He led the drafting of the new Firearms Control Act. He left government in 2000. He led the bid by South Africa, with eight other African countries, to host the world’s largest telescope, the Square Kilometre Array Radio Telescope. The bid was successful in 2012. The SKA South African team also designed and built the MeerKAT radio telescope, a world-leading telescope which has made major discoveries in the evolution of galaxies and clusters of galaxies and in pulsar and transient radio source discovery and timing, as a result of its unique sensitivity, timing accuracy and imaging quality. The MeerKAT will become part of the SKA Mid-Frequency Array in the late 2020s. SKA South Africa developed a world-leading Human Capital Development Programme, which enabled the development of a large and thriving radio astronomy science and technology community in South Africa from the initial five radio astronomers in 2003. It also trains scientists and engineers from the eight African partner countries. The SKA SA HCD programme led to the successful Development in Africa with Radio Astronomy (DARA) and the DARA Big Data programmes in partnership with the UK Government’s Newton Fund. He was an adviser to the Director of the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory, the successor to the SKA South Africa project. He has been appointed by the Minister for Trade, Industry and Competition to lead the development and implementation of a tripartite plan for the recovery and growth of the steel and steel products industries in South Africa. He is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Breakthrough Listen project of the Breakthrough Initiatives and a Trustee of the Paleontological Scientific Trust. | |||