Jason L. Sanders

I am a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Associate Professor in the Astrophysics Group at University College London.

I am interested in the structure, evolution and history of the Milky Way. This includes the properties of the Milky Way’s bar, the history and chemistry of the Galactic disc, the use of tidal streams as probes of large- and small-scale structure, the properties of dwarf spheroidal galaxies and the development of theoretical tools for doing dynamics. Most of my work is motivated by and uses results from Gaia and associated large-scale photometric and spectroscopic surveys of the Milky Way. My interests are given on the projects page or take a look at my and my group’s publications.

I co-lecture the third-year undergraduate lecture course at UCL on Physical Cosmology (PHAS0037) and I am the Astrophysics Group postgraduate tutor (see the student summary page for details of the current cohort).

From 2014-2020, I was a postdoc at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge. During this time, I was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow (from 2018-2019, part-supported by the Newton Trust) and a Junior Research Fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge (from 2015-2019). From 2011-2014 I read for a DPhil in Theoretical Astrophysics in the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof. James Binney. For a full description, see my cv.