(Photograph) - John Brown, professor of astrophysics at Glasgow University, has been appointed Astronomer Royal for Scotland, a post which has been vacant since the resignation of Malcolm Longair in 1990 to take up a chair in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.
Professor Brown, who has headed Glasgow's astronomy and astrophysics group since 1986, is acting convener of the Royal Society of Edinburgh's committee to promote astronomy research in Scotland. He has led NASA solar maximum mission workshops to analyse data from space missions, as well as being guest investigator on various space observatories, including NASA's Shuttle Spacelab 2, and the Japan-United States-United Kingdom projects to investigate solar activity.