Martin Rees but has criticised militant atheists for being too hostile to religion. He is a member of the Labour Party. Martin Rees Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, (born 23 June 1942) is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He has been Astronomer Royal since 1995 and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge from 2004 to 2012 and President of the Royal Society between 2005 and 2010. Rees was born on 23 June 1942 in York, England. After a peripatetic life during the war his parents, both teachers, settled with Rees, an only child, in a rural part of Shropshire near
Martin Rees and Jesus College, Cambridge. Rees is the author of more than 500 research papers, and he has made contributions to the origin of cosmic microwave background radiation, as well as to galaxy clustering and formation. His studies of the distribution of quasars led to final disproof of Steady State theory. He was one of the first to propose that enormous black holes power quasars, and that superluminal astronomical observations can be explained as an optical illusion caused by an object moving partly in the direction of the observer. Since the 1990s, Rees has worked on gamma-ray bursts, especially in collaboration