I'm an astronomer and astrobiologist at the University of Southern Queensland, in Australia, where I have the honour of being Professor of Astrophysics. I first became interested in astronomy as a five year old, when I saw an episode of The Sky At Night. At the age of eight, I joined my local astronomical society in the UK - the West Yorkshire Astronomical Society (WYAS). 

Following amazing advice from the professional astronomers who were kind enough to visit WYAS to give guest speaker talks, I moved to the University of Durham for my undergraduate studies, where I spent four years studying a Masters' degree in Physics and Astronomy. From there, I moved to Oxford, where I spent three years working on my doctoral, under the supervision of Dr Wyn Evans. My DPhil was awarded in 2004 for a thesis entitled 'The Behaviour of Small Bodies in the Outer Solar System', and I could finally call myself Dr Jonti!

With my PhD in hand, I moved to the University of Bern, Switzerland, where I spent three years as a postdoctoral research fellow, before moving back to the UK to take up a similar post at the Open University. I moved back to Durham for a year, in 2009, to take up a teaching roll at the University, before moving to Australia in 2010 to join the Exoplanetary Science group at the University of New South Wales. Finally, in early 2014, I moved to the University of Southern Queensland, where I have remained ever since! For more information on my research career, check out my other professional website - jontihorner.com, or visit my publication private library on the NASA ADS system.

I was greatly honoured, in 2023, to have an asteroid named after me. That object, (32520) Jontihorner, is most likely a metallic object, a few kilometres in diameter, moving in the inner part of the main asteroid belt, beyond the orbit of Mars.