Dr. Henri Boffin is an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching, Germany.

He obtained his PhD from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, in 1993. After a post-doc in Kobe, Japan, and in Cardiff, UK, he was appointed astronomer at the Royal Observatory of Belgium in 1998. As he is very keen to share science with society, he has experience in journalism (with a diploma from the Ecole Superieure de Journalisme de Lille), and in 2003, joined ESO as Astronomer and Press Officer, dealing with communication about all telescopes and projects of ESO.

From August 2010 till April 2016, Dr. Boffin he moved to Chile where he was an ESO Paranal Operations Staff Astronomer and the FORS2 and HARPS instrument scientist. In 2016, he moved back to Germany, in the User Support Department, where he mostly supports SPHERE, FORS2, and MUSE. He is also the project scientist of the new Exposure Time Calculator for all La Silla Paranal and ELT instruments and is the operations scientist for the upgrade of FORS.

His research is primarily devoted to the world of close binary stars, their formation and evolution. To this aim, he combines both observational and theoretical work, including hydrodynamical simulations. His current scientific interests include barium and symbiotic stars, Algols and binary nuclei of planetary nebulae, but more generally all interacting binary stars. He is also working on exoplanets, and more particularly on transmission spectroscopy as well as on exploiting the Gaia data, in particular for the study of clusters and filamentary structures.

Dr. Boffin has co-authored more than 160 refereed papers and organised more than 20 astronomical conferences. He has also developed a course on "Writing and Communicating Your Science", which he gave in several institutions.

More information in his web page at https://www.eso.org/~hboffin