Professor Warrick Couch is a Distinguished Professor at Swinburne’s Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing. Prior to coming to Swinburne, he was Director of the Australian Astronomical Observatory based in Sydney.

His principal research area is extragalactic astronomy and cosmology, with a particular focus on the role environment plays in the evolution of galaxies. This research involves major observational programs using the largest ground-based optical telescopes (VLT, Keck) as well as space-based telescopes (HST, Chandra). He was also lead investigator of the Swinburne-led ‘WiggleZ’ Dark Energy Project that was conducted with the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope.

Professor Couch was a member of the Supernova Cosmology Project, whose leader (Saul Perlmutter) shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for the team's discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. He was also a joint winner of the 2007 Gruber Prize in Cosmology for his role in the discovery of the accelerating universe, and a joint winner of the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, which ‘recognizes major insights into the deepest questions of the universe’. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.