Roger Griffin

Professor Roger Griffin was a British astronomer, active in the field of observational optical astronomy from the late 1950s until the 2010s. He studied as both an undergraduate and postgraduate at St John's College, Cambridge, becoming a permanent fellow there in 1972. He invented a new method of measuring the radial velocity of stars (how fast they are moving directly towards or away from us), which was faster and more accurate than previous methods and was eventually adopted worldwide, and which he used in his study of binary stars. He was a keen runner, completing the London Marathon a number of times at a leading pace for his age-group well into his 70s.