- Richard Vaughan is a BBC-trained television documentary director with forty years’ experience in creating scientific and medical films for an international audience. He has also been responsible for a large portfolio of published materials, including social and economic commentaries on several African countries.
- His films have been broadcast in more than a hundred countries around the world, winning awards from the British Medical Association, the Royal Television Society, Semana Internacional de Cine Cientifico (Spain) and ITB Berlin.
- In 2005, Richard Vaughan founded the Kenya Optical Telescope Initiative (KOTI), in collaboration with several other local and international scientists, as well as Bitange Ndemo, current Kenyan Ambassador to Brussels. Over the last twenty years, this network has collaborated with the Universities of Edinburgh, Leeds and Manchester in the UK, and the South African Large Telescope (SALT).
- KOTI is founded on the knowledge that the north of Kenya has unusually good night skies for optical wavelength astronomy, a resource that has to date remained entirely untapped. Through a series of local and international grants, KOTI has undertaken several studies of Kenya’s atmosphere, using satellite datasets from the British Meteorological Office and the European Union. These have enabled the production of shortlist of high-quality sites, which are possibly the best in the world at equatorial latitudes. KOTI is now collaborating with the Turkana Basin Institute to install weather stations at these sites, to establish in detail their suitability for research-level observatories, which can be deployed for local and international use.
- Richard Vaughan is a graduate with First Class Honours in Social Science from the University of Bristol, UK (1979).
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