Dr Richard Stancliffe

Biography

After studying Physics at the University of Oxford, I did my Ph.D. at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge under the supervision of Dr. Christopher Tout. My thesis was on the evolution and nucleosythesis of asymptotic giant branch stars. It was at this time that I first encountered the Cambridge tellar evolution code, STARS, which I have been working with ever since. I have gradually expanded the code's capabilities over the years, including adding routines to handle nucleosythesis and the evolution of binary stars.

I was a Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, from 2005-2008. I then worked at Monash University from 2008-2011 under a fellowship awarded by the Australian Research Council, where I focussed on understanding carbon-enhanced metal-poor stars and the mixing processes that affect their surface abundances. I was briefly at the Research School for Astronomy & Astrophysics, Australian National University, as a Stromlo fellow, before moving to the University of Bonn to start my own research group in 2012. This was made possible via a Sofja Kovalevskaja award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. My group's research centred around all aspects of binary stellar evolution including nucleosynthesis and mass transfer.

I joined the University of Bristol in 2021 as the Director of the Foundation Programme. As of 2025, I am the School's Education Director.

Research interests

I am interested in how stars make the elements in the Periodic Table. In particular, I focus on the lives and interactions of low-mass stars and the heavy elements that these stars are able to produce via the slow neutron capture process. The signatures of this important process are often to be detected in binary star system, where a now long-dead asymptotic giant branch star has polluted its companion with the results of its nucleosythesis. Examples of such systems are barium stars and carbon-enhanced metal-poor stars. The abundance patterns of these objects depends on many things: how mass is transferred between stars, how fluids mix within stars themselves as well how elements and isotopes are produced in the first place. My research aims to understand these processes.