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About

R. M. Sharples is a leading figure in astronomical instrumentation, whose career has been defined by pioneering robotic fiber-positioning systems for multi-object spectroscopy. His foundational work began with the Autofib-2 positioner for the William Herschel Telescope, but his most celebrated contribution is the 2dF facility at the Anglo-Australian Observatory—a landmark instrument that revolutionized large-scale galaxy surveys by enabling up to 400 simultaneous spectra across a 2° field of view, earning over 350 citations. Sharples later became a key architect of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), designing and implementing its focal plane of 5,020 robotic fiber positioners. This system, described in his highly cited 2022 paper (175 citations), automatically repositions fibers every 10–20 minutes with micron precision, enabling DESI to measure 40 million galaxies and quasars. His work on DESI’s fiber system (57 citations) and his analysis of fiber assignment incompleteness (20 citations) have been critical for ensuring the accuracy of DESI’s cosmological measurements, particularly for studies of dark energy. Sharples’s innovations have directly enabled some of the most ambitious spectroscopic surveys in modern astronomy, making him a central figure in the field of robotic instrumentation.