Long boring biography for people who like/need this sort of thing

 (I suggest you don't use the whole thing – use whichever bits are appropriate):

Ray Norris is an astrophysicist at the CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility.

As a teenager in England, he loved the lonely windswept hills of Dartmoor, where he'd lie on the ground at night, staring up at the black sky, wondering whether there was anyone out there standing on some distant planet, looking back at our Sun and wondering if there was intelligent life down here. He attended St. Albans School, where he became notorious for his passion for Amateur Radio, and built a small radio-telescope at home operating at a wavelength of 13 cm. A high point of this project was detecting the Apollo 13 spacecraft, listening in to the astronauts' conversations. He then studied at Cambridge, where he received an Honours Degree in Theoretical Physics. He went on to do a PhD and a postdoc at Jodrell Bank, near Manchester, where he tried to use natural interstellar masers to unravel the processes of star formation. He also tackled the problem of whether Stonehenge and other Bronze-age monuments had been built as astronomical observatories (they were, but not very good ones). It was during his PhD that he first experienced the thrill of discovering a new piece of knowledge to add to the sum of human wisdom. He quickly became addicted to that feeling and has spent the rest of his life trying to get regular fixes.

In 1983, Ray and his family fled from the cold and murky Manchester weather to the sunnier climes of Sydney, to help with the design of the Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF). His research interests gradually moved outwards from star formation to luminous galaxies, and he shouldered an increasing management role. In 1994 he became Head of Astrophysics at the ATNF, and in 2000 became Deputy Director. In 2001 he led the successful $60m bid for Australian astronomy under the Federal Government's Major National Research Facilities (MNRF) program, and then established and was Foundation Director of the Australian Astronomy MNRF. 

In 2005, he left management to concentrate on research, and started the Australia Telescope Large Area Survey (ATLAS) project, which is the widest deep radio survey yet attempted, with the goal of imaging the faintest radio galaxies and star-forming galaxies in the Universe, to help understand how they form and evolve. He is now very excited (some would say obsessed!) to be leading  the EMU (Evolutionary Map of the Universe) project, which will use the ASKAP telescope to survey 75% of the sky at an unprecedented sensitivity. EMU is expected to discover about 70 milliuon bradio souyrces, compared to the 2.5 million discovered over the entire history of radio-astronomy.

History tells us that large projects like EMU tend to make unexpected discoveries (e.g. pulsars, quasars, dark energy) that we cannot easily plan for. But since these are probably going to be the most important discoveries made with ASKAP, we have to be ready to make them. Ray therefore initaited a project called WTF with the goal of building eScience software (using machine learning and other techniques) to find  the unexpected.

He is also fascinated by the challenge of optimising the transformation of scientific data into knowledge, and ensuring that they are available to all scientists through the data centres and Virtual Observatory, rather than being hidden in some dusty archive. To this end, he initiated the Australian Virtual Observatory Project, joined the Executive Committee of  CODATA (the Data Committee of the International Council for Science), served as  President of IAU Commission 5 (Astronomical Data), was a member of the Strategic Committee on Information and Data (SCID) of the International Council for Science, and initiated the Australian National Committee for Data in Science. However, he has now stepped down from strategic roles so he can focus on his EMU project.

In 2005 he started to study the astronomy of indigenous Australians, and was stunned by the depth and richness of culture which is largely unappreciated in non-indigenous communities. This study has now become a significant research project, and Ray continues this research field as a sideline in his non-existent spare time.

He has about over 300 academic publications and about 300 media appearances, and has also appeared in the First Astronomers stage show with Wardaman elder Bill Yidumduma Harney. He has also written a novel, Graven Images, available from Amazon and other good bookstores.

The best things about his job are:

• The excitement of being involved in one of the most exhilarating areas of science. He is astounded by the sheer arrogance of this little human race living on an obscure little planet, who are actually able to deduce the way that the Universe came into being, simply by making observations of the sky.
• The variety: He is rarely doing the same thing for very long, and is constantly having to learn new things. His working hours are all over the place, he travels a lot, and he gets to meet some of the most fascinating people alive!