Alan joined the faculty at Queen's University Belfast in October 1993 and recently retired in August 2024. Alan's primary research area is the observational characterisation of asteroids and comets in the inner Solar system, to constrain their compositions and evolutionary state. He also works on Near-Earth Objects, Interstellar Objects and exocomets. These studies involve both dedicated allocations of time at observatories such as ING and ESO, plus analysis of wide-field sky surveys. Currently he is member of the ATLAS project, and is on the Science Management Board of the ESA Hera mission and the investigation team for the NASA DART mission.

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