Sir William Ian Axford FRS (2 January 1933 – 13 March 2010) was a New Zealand space scientist who was director of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Aeronomy from 1974 to 1990.
Axford's research was focused on the interaction of the Sun with the magnetic field of Earth (magnetosphere) or the interstellar medium (heliosphere).
Axford studied at Canterbury University in Christchurch for his double bachelor's degrees in science and engineering, followed by a double Master's in science with first class honours and in engineering with distinction, then undertook doctoral studies at the University of Manchester and received his PhD in 1960.
[2] After a year at the University of Cambridge in 1960, where he played two matches of first-class cricket for the Cambridge University Cricket Club,[3] Axford then joined the Defence Research Board of Canada, where he published one of his most cited papers: A unifying theory of high-latitude geophysical phenomena and geomagnetic storms, in 1961.
[5] He held that position, with a short break in which he was Vice Chancellor of the Victoria University of Wellington from 1982 to 1985, until his retirement in 2001.