In 2005 I joined the UK Astronomy Technology Centre (UKATC) in Edinburgh to work on early design studies for ELT instruments. I wanted to extend my work to galaxies beyond the Local Group, and while in La Palma I got involved in developing the science case for ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). More than a decade on, we’ve now published over 35 papers from the survey, with the results prompting several follow-up studies with Hubble, Chandra and ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). An early result was the discovery of a massive runaway O-type star, supported by some of the first data from the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph after Servicing Mission 5. In 2008 I started the VLT-FLAMES Tarantula Survey, an ambitious multi-epoch spectroscopic survey of massive stars in the dramatic 30 Doradus star-forming region. The FLAMES project brought me together with a fantastic group of collaborators across Europe and in the US, many of whom I still work closely with today. I initially worked on Hubble ultraviolet observations of massive stars in the Magellanic Clouds, but also took on a leading role in a large European Southern Observatory (ESO) programme (he VLT-FLAMES Survey of Massive Stars) to quantify the effects of metallicity on massive-star evolution. In 2002 I moved to a postdoctoral position at the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes in La Palma. This was a first hook for me into the power of new instrumentation, and sparked my interest in shaping future facilities. 2dF was still fairly new, and it blew me away at the time that in just a handful of nights we assembled a spectroscopic sample that was a hundred times that of all the past efforts combined. On my first observing runs I used the Two-degree Field (2dF) facility on the Anglo-Australian Telescope for a survey of massive stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud. I started out at University College London, first as an undergraduate and then as a postgraduate. By Chris Evans- New ESA Hubble and Webb Project Scientist: Chris Evans

Stsci astrometry