Professor Matthew Bailes is a former Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and the Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav). He is a world leader in the discovery and timing of millisecond pulsars and has made pivotal contributions to the discovery of the Fast Radio Bursts – enigmatic millisecond-duration bursts of radio waves that strike the Earth many thousands of times per day and are of unknown origin. In 2023 this was recognised when he was awarded the Shaw Prize in Astronomy.

Professor Bailes’ research mainly concerns developing instrumentation for time domain astrophysics and using it for pulsar and FRB discovery in conjunction with collaborators in Australia, Europe, South Africa and the US. He is the leader of the MeerTime collaboration that is using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa to explore relativistic gravity with rafdio pulsars.

Professor Bailes founded the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne in 1998 and served as its Director for the first 12 years. In 2021 he co-founded the spin-off company Fourier Space Pty Ltd with his former staff and students. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Sciences. In 2024 he was awarded the Prime Minister's Prize for Science.

Professor Bailes is a leading advocate for the promotion of STEM and gives engaging public lectures using his Centre's advanced visualisation tools. He is currently leading the creation of a 45-megapixel 3D immersive screen at Swinburne University of Technology's Hawthorn campus for the promotion of STEM. Swinburne's Virtual Universe will be the world's first fully-immersive 3D screen for astronomy education to feature instant access to a comprehensive library of breath-taking astronomical images with AI assistants.