Martin Rees 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 the border with Wales. There, his parents founded Bedstone College, a boarding school based on progressive educational concepts that
John Rawlings Rees meeting twice a week to formulate a new way forward for their work at Tavistock, based on war-time experience. Rees’ plans for the Institute of Medical Psychology were never realised; instead, the group went on to found the Tavistock Institute, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. Rees left shortly afterwards in 1947. After leaving the Tavistock, Rees’ first role was as the chief organiser of the 1948 International Congress for Mental Health, held in London. At this congress, the World Federation for Mental Health was founded, and Rees was elected as the first president. This organisation is now a non-governmental