The Bok Lecture

The Bok Lecture, a highlight of Starfest, features Christian Wolf is Associate Professor of Astronomy at the Australian National University and Director of the Siding Spring Observatory (SSO). He works mostly on hungry black holes, but has worked in the past on the evolution of galaxies such as the Milky Way.

He led the SkyMapper Southern Survey, which created a detailed atlas of the Southern night sky from 7 years of observations at SSO. With his team, he discovered the fastest-growing black hole in the Universe in 2018 and then broke their own record in 2023. Christian spent part of his childhood in Sardinia, where he found his love for the night sky.

He studied in the US and Germany and in 1999 obtained his PhD from the Max-Planck Institute of Astronomy in Heidelberg. After a decade at Oxford University, he joined the ANU in 2013.