The primary purpose of the event is to celebrate Professor Michael Feast’s 90th birthday. At his own request the meeting will focus on the future and highlight the wonderful opportunities available to local scientists from South African facilities and from international collaboration.
Prof. Feast is a former director of the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) and an honorary professor at the University of Cape Town (UCT). He is currently an NRF A1 rated researcher and was the 2015 recipient of the NRF’s lifetime achievement award (http://www.nrf.ac.za/nrfawards/lifetimeachievement).
More about Prof. Michael Feast from the NRF webpage: http://www.nrf.ac.za/content/professor-michael-feast
“Professor Feast’s current fields of interest include the composition, structure and evolution of our own and nearby galaxies; the use of variable stars to establish distances in the Universe; and mass-loss from stars.
He is quite possibly the only academic to have published papers in Nature 66 years apart, is listed in the international Who’s Who, has had a minor planet named after him, and has represented South African astronomy at the highest international level. He is an editor of one of the main international astronomical journals.
His work on the brightest stars in our neighbour galaxies, the Magellanic Clouds, was a crucial step in our understanding of stellar evolution, and even today scientific literature still refers to his early work, although published over 50 years ago.
Awards and honours include the JFW Herschel Medal from the Royal Society of South Africa, the Gill Medal from the Astronomical Society of South Africa, the De Beers Gold Medal from the South African Institute of Physics, and Fellowships of the Royal Society of South Africa, the South African Institute of Physics, and an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Astronomical Society. He is also a founding member of the Academy of Sciences of South Africa.”