Series 817 - Alex Rodgers' research papers

Alexander (Alex) Rodgers was born in Newcastle, New South Wales, in 1932 and graduated with honours in astronomy from the University of Sydney. He won a scholarship to ANU and completed his doctorate in 1958, mentored by Stromlo Director Richard van der Reit Woolley. Rodgers then spent three years as a Carnegie Research Fellow at Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories in California and as a Fulbright Scholar at the Royal Greenwich Observatory before returning to Stromlo in the 1960s.

Rodgers was appointed as Stromlo’s sixth Director in 1987. His passion for engineering influenced his Directorship and he argued that Stromlo’s engineering capability was a vital part of its identity and its future role (ANU Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2017). He was responsible for the Observatories' instrumentation for most of his career and focused on developing new instrumentation. His first instrument project was building a spectrophotometer for the 50-inch telescope in the late 1960s, but his favourite instrument was the 74-inch Telescope, which was Australia's major spectroscopic research tool until the 2.3m Telescope at Siding Spring in the 1970s (Freeman, 1997).

Rodgers’ most significant contribution was his involvement in the MACHO project – an international search for ‘dark matter’, a project that was widely acclaimed.

After completing his directorship in 1992, Rodgers stayed at ANU and continued his research on variable stars, as well as serving on the ANU Council. He died in 1997, just a few weeks before his scheduled retirement.