Role: Camera verification

Dr. Pierre Royer (Ir Electronics & Physics 1994, PhD in Astrophysics, 2001) is Research Expert in Instrumentation at the Institute of Astronomy at KU Leuven. Until 2016, he has been involved in all development phases of the PACS instrument, operational on-board the Herschel Space Telescope between 2009 and 2013. He was involved in all phases of instrument testing, from component level tests in the lab to in-orbit calibrations and science exploitation.  He is now involved in the test-team for the European instrument MIRI onboard the James Webb Space Telescope and in PLATO, where a close partnership was established between KU Leuven and the Centre Spatial de Liège, who share the responsibility for the integration and alignment of the telescope optical units with the focal plane assemblies and the front end electronics. In this context, he is in charge of the test suite to be developed for the cameras integration, focus alignment and verification. He is the (co-)author of 65 refereed publications, gathering over 4000 citations. This includes papers on star formation, supernovae remnants, massive stars, circumstellar and interstellar matter, but also on future instrumentation, data mining, calibration, etc.