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Doug Bertram was born in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1962 and was the first graduate of the Physics with Astrophysics course at Birmingham University in the UK. During his postgraduate career he worked on Birmingham University's X-Ray Telescope (XRT), which was flown on the Spacelab 2 mission aboard Challenger in 1985. The telescope was a coded mask instrument that imaged hard x-rays from astronomical objects (clusters of galaxies, compact objects in the Galactic Centre and Galactic Plane and supernova remnants were the main targets).
His main research interest was studying the diffuse x-ray emission that comes from the extremely tenuous but hot plasma between galaxies in a large cluster of galaxies called the Perseus Cluster. He was awarded the degree of Ph.D. in 1987.
The unique (at the time!) ability of the XRT to map the hot cluster gas both spectrally and spatially enabled the Birmingham scientists to map the distribution and quantity of gravitating matter in the clusters that were studied. This allowed important deductions to be made about the amount (and distribution) of Dark Matter in clusters of galaxies. A hot topic!
Dr. Bertram's research interests then moved down in terms of energy per photon to the soft x-ray band and the extreme ultraviolet (XUV) with work on the Rosat Observatory. His work included participating in the large UK team performing the first all-sky survey in the XUV band. A major part of his duties included teaching undergraduate students in laboratories, at the Observatory, tutorials and workshops, all of which he enjoyed immensley. Teaching is fun (honest!).
He then moved out of academia in 1995 to work in satellite communications, another huge leap down the spectrum, from tens of keV to thirty millionths of an eV per photon in a short space of time! Doug has helped run some very successful international collaborative trials and is enjoying his work greatly, learning, mastering and inovating new technical material is fun too!
He didn't miss out optical astronomy on the way down the spectrum as he used the Isaac Newton Telescope on La Palma for two separate weeks. The first occasion on optical follow-up work for Rosat and the second occasion on late-type stars as a stand-in for a (then) sick friend.
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