Alan Astbury

Early life and education He was born in Crewe, England, to Jane and Harold Astbury. His mother worked in a bakery and his father was an engineer for the Co-op Dairy. He went to Nantwich and Acton Grammar School. Although he was a good cricketer and footballer - he played for Crewe Schoolboys along with Chelsea and England player Frank Blunstone - his parents discouraged a career in football.

Academic career In 1953, he joined the University of Liverpool, gaining a first-class honours degree in 1956 followed by a PhD in 1959 under Alec Merrison and Hugh Muirhead. He won a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to work on Liverpool's 380 MeV, 1.83m (72 inch) synchrocyclotron, the world's second-largest at the time. The team's work confirmed parity violation in muon capture.

He joined Kenneth Crowe's group at Berkeley in 1961, using their 4.67m (184 inch) synchrocyclotron and working on a bent-crystal spectrometer for more precise particle mass measurement. In 1963, he joined the inchoative Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) structures, with their 7GeV Nimrod proton synchrotron and eventually became the RAL's Chief Principal Scientific Officer. There, he and others confirmed charge-parity violation in neutral kaon decay. In 1964, the RAL began a two-decade collaboration with Peter Kalmus's group at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), as well as with groups from Harwell and the University of Bergen amongst others. Experiments were carried out on various weak and strong interactions in the UK and low-energy antiproton-proton experiments at CERN. In 1974, he became the chair of the Nimrod coordinating team, in 1975, the chair of the CERN Electronic Experiments Committee and in 1976 he joined the evaluation committee of Canada's national particle accelerator, TRIUMF.

Astbury became a professor at the University of Victoria, receiving significant funding for his research. He was joined by researchers from CERN. In 1986, he became a member of the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) grant selection committee and, in 1991, director of Canada's Institute of Particle Physics (IPP).

He died in 2014, survived by his wife, Kathleen (née Stratmeyer), and daughters Elizabeth and Gillian. 1986 Rutherford Medal and Prize 1988 Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) 1993 Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS)