Profile

Phil Uttley is Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam.  After completing his PhD at the University of Southampton in 2000, he held postdoctoral fellowships at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Amsterdam, before returning to Southampton as Assistant Professor, on an STFC Advanced Fellowship, in 2007.  Phil joined the Faculty of the Anton Pannekoek Institute in 2011.  Phil uses X-ray variability to understand accreting black hole systems, from the stellar mass X-ray binaries, to supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei, publishing more than 130 papers in this area to date.

Research and Teaching

Phil’s current research focuses on developing new methods and models to understand the structure of the innermost regions of accreting black hole systems.  He has pioneered the ‘X-ray reverberation mapping’ of the innermost regions of accreting black holes using the echo of the varying X-ray signal off of the accreting structures.  Phil is closely involved in new X-ray observatory concepts and co-chairs the Strong Field Gravity Working Group for the proposed Enhanced X-ray Timing and Polarimetry (eXTP) mission.  Phil’s teaching and research topics are closely linked: he teaches the Masters courses on Accretion on to Compact Objects, and Statistical Methods.

Keywords

Black holes, accretion, time-series methods, X-ray astronomy.