The European Southern Observatory is the world's premier ground-based observatory. Headquartered in Germany, ESO runs four observing sites in Chile. ESO telescopes include the Very Large Telescope, the European part of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, and the European Extremely Large Telescope, currently under construction. The ESO Council is the ruling body of ESO and has representatives of each of the 16 member states, and observers from Australia.
Paul Groot is professor of astronomy at Radboud University and the University of Cape Town. His scientific specialty is the study of binary stellar remnants, including gravitational wave sources and transient phenomena. He is an observational astronomer with a long-standing track-record in astronomical instrumentation. He was the Project Scientist of the X-Shooter spectrograph for ESO's Very Large Telescope and is the Principal Investigator for the MeerLICHT telescope, located in South Africa, as well as for the BlackGEM telescope array, located at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile.
Groot is the former head of the Department of Astrophysics at Radboud and also served as Chair of the Board of the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy, NOVA, which is the home base for ESO in the Netherlands.