Roy Smits
Dr. Roy Smits is a Dutch astronomer, writer and science-communicator. He studied at the Radboud University of Nijmegen in The Netherlands.
He earned his PhD by studying the radio-emission of compact stars called pulsars. Smits continued his research at the University of Manchester and ASTRON, the Dutch institute for radio-astronomy and has been involved in several international astronomy collaborations. His work laid the foundation for pulsar-research with the Square Kilometre Array, a telescope currently under construction in South-Africa and Australia.
Parallel to his research, Smits has always been an active science-communicator, including teaching astronomy at schools utilizing a mobile planetarium and collaborating with many artists. In 2020 Smits wrote his first book on astronomy for the general public. He is currently working on a children's book.