I am a professor in the Astrophysics Research Centre in the School of Maths and Physics at Queen's University Belfast. I work on exploding stars and unusual transients in the Universe. My group run large sky survey projects such as Pan-STARRS and ATLAS to scan the sky and find transients that stretch our understanding of how stars die. We showed that the first ever discovery of an electromagnetic counterpart to a gravitational wave source (GW170817) produced heavy radioactive elements and was consistent with models of a kilonova from a pair of merging neutron stars (see our paper here). I was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society in 2020 and was awarded the Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal in the Physical and Mathematical Sciences in 2018.