Damien Jones
Papers
3
Total Citations
119
H-Index
3
About
Damien Jones is a leading astronomical instrumentation scientist whose work has been pivotal to the field of Galactic Archaeology. He is best known for his central role in the design, integration, and commissioning of the High Efficiency and Resolution Multi-Element Spectrograph (HERMES) at the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT). This facility-class optical spectrograph, which he helped bring to first light, is the primary engine behind the GALAH survey—the first major attempt to reconstruct the formation and evolutionary history of the Milky Way by chemically tagging its stars. Jones’s contributions are documented in highly cited publications, including the landmark 2015 paper on HERMES’s first light results (93 citations). By enabling the simultaneous collection of high-resolution spectra for hundreds of stars, his work has provided the foundational dataset for understanding how our galaxy assembled over billions of years. Through his instrumental ingenuity, Damien Jones has directly empowered a new generation of stellar and galactic research, cementing his legacy as a key architect of modern Galactic Archaeology.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1
- 2Integrating the HERMES spectrograph for the AAT17 citations · 2012
- 3First light results from the Hermes spectrograph at the AAT9 citations · 2014