Longair, Malcolm

Malcolm Longair, in full Malcolm Sim Longair, (born May 18, 1941, Dundee, Scotland), Scottish astronomer, noted for his scholarship and teaching, who served as astronomer royal for Scotland from 1980 to 1990.

Longair was educated at the University of St. Andrews, Dundee, and at the University of Cambridge (M.A., Ph.D., 1967). In 1968–69 he went as an exchange fellow to the Soviet Union, where he worked in Moscow at the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. He was a resident fellow of Cambridge from 1967 to 1971 and an official fellow from 1971 to 1980 and held positions of both demonstrator (1970–75) and lecturer (1975–80). He was a visiting professor for two years in the United States. His appointment to the position of astronomer royal brought with it the titles of Regius Professor of Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh and director of the Royal Observatory on Edinburgh’s Blackford Hill. He was head of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge from 1997 to 2005; he later served as the lab’s director of development (2007–11).

With others Longair edited a number of books, including The Large Scale Structure of the Universe (1978), Scientific Research with the Space Telescope (1979), and Astrophysical Cosmology (1982). He wrote High Energy Astrophysics (1981), Theoretical Concepts in Physics (1984), Alice and the Space Telescope (1989), Galaxy Formation (1998), The Cosmic Century (2006), and Maxwell’s Enduring Legacy: A Scientific History of the Cavendish Laboratory (2016).