Carolin Crawford

Crawford studied the Mathematical Tripos and received a Bachelor of Arts honours degree in Mathematics at Newnham College, Cambridge in 1985. In 1988 she received her PhD[6] for research undertaken at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge on cooling flows supervised by Andrew Fabian.[2]

After her PhD, Crawford progressed through a series of postdoctoral and research fellowships at Balliol College, Oxford, the Institute of Astronomy, Trinity Hall, Cambridge and Newnham College, Cambridge. From 1996 to 2007 she held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship.[7]

In 2004 she was appointed a Fellow and College Lecturer at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where she is now also the undergraduate admissions tutor for the Physical Sciences. She holds this position in conjunction with her role as outreach officer at the Institute of Astronomy, which she first took on in 2005.[7]

She served as Gresham Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College from 2011 to 2015, a position in which she delivered free public lectures on astronomy and astrophysics in the City of London.[8]

Crawford's "primary research interests are in combining X-ray, optical and near-infrared observations to study the physical processes occurring around massive galaxies at the core of clusters of galaxies. In particular, she observes the complex interplay between the hot intra-cluster medium, filaments of warm ionized gas, cold molecular clouds, star formation and the radio plasma flowing out from the central supermassive black hole." [9]