C. Venter

Christo joined the Centre for Space Research, North-West University (NWU) in 2002 as a graduate student. Upon completion of his PhD in 2008, he successfully applied for a NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) Fellowship and spent 2009 at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, USA. He held the following NWU positions: Lecturer (2005 – 2008), Senior Lecturer (2009 – 2014), Associate Professor (2015 – 2017), Full Professor (2018 – present), Subject Chair (2015 – 2017) and Research Director (2020 – 2022). Christo has been involved in modelling of pulsars and pulsar-like systems, being part of the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) Collaboration, a world-class very-high-energy Gamma-ray telescope situated in Namibia, the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) gamma-ray satellite, as well as the next-generation ground-based gamma-ray experiment called the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). Of late, he has moved closer to radio astronomy and has been the principal investigator of four Open Time Proposals on the MeerKAT radio telescope. The National Research Foundation (NRF) awarded him a B1 rating (2024 – 2030). He is co-author of 33 peer-reviewed papers, 37 peer-reviewed proceedings, 29 conference proceedings articles, 214 H.E.S.S., 25 Fermi LAT, and 4 MeerKAT papers. He has attended 61 international and 29 local conferences and has given 13 plenary talks, supervising 11 Honours projects, 10 M.Sc. students (another 2 ongoing), 5 Ph.D. students (3 ongoing), and 3 postdocs (2 ongoing). He plans to continue research in the lively field of multi-messenger astronomy, including the use of data from facilities such as H.E.S.S., Fermi, CTA, Chandra, NICER, MeerKAT and SKA.