Bryan Gaensler is an award-winning astronomer and passionate science communicator, who is internationally recognised for his groundbreaking work on dying stars, interstellar magnets and cosmic explosions. A former Young Australian of the Year, NASA Hubble Fellow, Harvard professor and Australian Laureate Fellow, Gaensler is currently the Director of the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. He gave the 2001 Australia Day Address to the nation, was awarded the 2011 Pawsey Medal for outstanding research by a physicist aged under 40, and in 2013 was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. His best-selling popular science book "Extreme Cosmos" was published worldwide in 2012, and has subsequently been translated into four other languages.