The international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Observatory (SKAO) has announced that its new director-general began her tenure on Monday. She is Professor Jessica Dempsey and she has replaced Professor Philip Diamond (who headed the SKA for about 14 years). Her term of office will be five years. She has taken over at a time when the SKAO is about to commence early science operations, while both of its radio telescope arrays (in South Africa and Australia) are continuing to be built “at pace”.

“As someone who loves nothing more than building and running telescopes, there is not a better time to be asked to take up this role – we are just getting to the cool stuff!” she highlights. “This is a daring project, unprecedented in scale and scope, and it will need the skills of every single team member on three continents and all the support of our broad global partnership to see it come to light. It is humbling to be asked to lead these amazing teams and this ambitious global endeavour, and I am passionately dedicated to its success.”

The SKAO embraces a mid-frequency array in South Africa (SKA-Mid) and a low-frequency array in Australia (SKA-Low). Science verification, which will see scientists start getting access to SKAO data, should start, for the SKA-Low, during the second half of this year. The SKAO head office is in the UK.

An Australian, Dempsey’s speciality is astronomical telescopes, and she has been involved in the building and operating of telescopes on every continent (including Antarctica). She was a founding member of the Event Horizon Telescope team, which secured the first ever image of a black hole. The team was awarded the Breakthrough Prize for that achievement.

She has also been head of operations at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii; deputy director of the East Asian Observatory, also in Hawaii; and director of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (better known as ASTRON). In 2023 she became the world’s first Professor of Ethics in Astronomy, at Radboud University in the Netherlands.

“As a strong advocate for greater diversity, equity and opportunity at all levels of astronomy, Professor Dempsey has spoken extensively about creating inclusive practices in the workplace,” points out the SKAO.

The current full member countries of the SKAO are Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK. Countries in the process of joining the SKA are France, Japan, and the Republic of (South) Korea.