Peter T. Gallagher

Peter T. Gallagher was born to Peter (died 2003) and Patricia Gallagher, of Clontarf,[5] a northern suburb of Dublin. He has a brother and a sister.[6] He attended the local Belgrove Primary School, and for secondary school, the Irish Christian Brothers' O'Connell School on North Circular Road, central Dublin.[7] His father was a fitter and service engineer with Ingersoll Rand, and father and son worked with mechanical and electrical items in the family's back garden. Gallagher pursued chemistry and technical drawing for the Irish Leaving Certificate.[8][4] He played Gaelic football to minor level with Clontarf GAA, and youth and adult rugby with Clontarf Football Club, and in his teens, he played lead guitar in a heavy metal/punk band.[4]

He was the first member of his family to attend college, pursuing a Bachelor of Science at University College Dublin, where he studied a wide range of subjects but moved to focus on physics and specifically astronomy after being given a copy of A Brief History of Time as a present. He qualified with an honours B.Sc. in Physics and Maths in 1995, and secured a place on a funded Masters course in Optoelectronics at Queen's University Belfast, qualifying first in his year, with distinction, in Optoelectronics and Image Processing in 1996. After some work in the Canary Islands, he deepened his academic focus on astronomy and pursued a funded PhD from Queen's. He received an offer to work in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University, the department where Stephen Hawking worked, but declined this.[5] He qualified in Astrophysics in 2000,[4] having defended a thesis entitled Optical and EUV observations of the solar atmosphere.[9]

Gallagher worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at two astronomical facilities of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, the Owens Valley Solar Array and the Big Bear Solar Observatory, both in California, and at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center near Washington, D.C.[10] Among other works he was able to take measurements with NASA's SOHO spacecraft.[8] Having reached the level of Senior Scientist, he was offered a long-term NASA job, but wanted to return to Ireland, and when his wife was offered a post at University College Dublin (UCD) in 2005, they decided to move back together, even at significant reduction in pay, and he secured an initial job teaching Space Science at UCD before receiving an opportunity to head the Solar Physics & Space Weather Research Group[10] at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) from the beginning of 2006.[8][4] He worked on observations of the Sun, space weather[11][10][12] including disruptive solar storms, and solar physics, and has been quoted by the media on these[13] and related topics, such as the International Heliophysical Year,[14] and certain space expeditions.[15]

Shortly after returning to Ireland he was asked to take a key role in twin NASA solar observation flights back in the US, designed to study the massively higher temperature of the Sun's corona compared to its actual upper layers. This was due to his experience in coordinating solar observations and developing specialised image interpretation software.[16] In 2009 he and his team participated, with the Royal Observatory of Belgium, in a satellite project, PROBA-2, to study solar storms; they wrote software for two elements.[17] The launch was successful, and was marked by a launch party in Trinity College's Science Gallery, attended by diplomatic representatives of Belgium, and of the Russian Federation, from where the launch was made.[18]

In 2012 he was one of the lead signatories of a letter by a group of active scientists to the Irish Times which expressed concern as to the Irish government's lack of commitment to basic research, and the implications this could have for the country and the avoidance or risk of "brain drain".[19] In 2015 he and some colleagues attempted a solar atmosphere observation from a fixed-wing Irish Air Corps aircraft with a special camera at the time of the last solar eclipse to be visible from Europe until 2026.[20] Also in 2015, he led the building of a magnetometer network by TCD and the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, capable of detecting solar storm activity.[21] Professor Gallagher's group also worked with Lockheed-Martin, Eirgrid, and other companies.[22]

In 2018 Gallagher was appointed as Senior Professor and Head of Astronomy and Astrophysics by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS); he remains an adjunct professor at Trinity College Dublin.[23] As part of the role, he was also appointed as Director of the historic Dunsink Observatory, owned by the State and managed by DIAS, near Dublin.[24] He has stated that he would like to open up the observatory campus, which is near a cycling and walking "greenway" along the Royal Canal of Ireland and the River Tolka, adding a coffee shop and growing visitor numbers from 5,000 to 50,000, making it s significant tourist and cultural attraction for West Dublin.[25]

Gallagher has published a wide range of articles, and is, according to Scopus as of October 2020, highly cited, with a h-index of 37.[40] His most-cited paper is "An observational overview of solar flares" in Space Science Reviews (2011), of which he was a co-author. He most-cited first-author paper is "Rapid acceleration of a coronal mass ejection in the low corona and implications for propagation" in the Astrophysical Journal Letters (2003).[41]

Gallagher met his future wife, Emma Teeling, in the first year of his science degree at UCD. They kept in touch while pursuing advanced studies in Belfast and elsewhere, living near Washington, D.C., for part of their time in the US, and moving back to Ireland together when Teeling received a job offer.[4] They have two sons.[38] The Teeling-Gallagher boys developed a Minecraft LOFAR environment which was mentioned on the websites of the European and Irish LOFAR consortia.[42] He coaches youth rugby teams at Clontarf FC.

• Prof. Peter T. Gallagher, DIAS
• LOFAR in Ireland – Team
• Official Twitter account, with news from Dunsink too