Silas Laycock is a professor of Astronomy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He joined UMass Lowell in Fall 2010, following postdoctoral research at Gemini Observatory and Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Laycock also completed his Ph.D in Astronomy at the University of Southampton, UK in 2002. His research focuses on pulsars, black holes, binary stars, x-rays, high energy radiation, optical spectroscopy and adaptive optics.