Pawsey was then awarded an Exhibition Research Scholarship to study at Sidney Sussex College at the University of Cambridge, where he worked under the direction of J.A.

In February 1940, Pawsey returned to Australia to work at the recently formed Division of Radiophysics in CSIR (later renamed CSIRO).

[3] To investigate the latter Pawsey, with Ruby Payne-Scott and Lindsay McCready, used an existing Royal Australian Air Force antenna at Collaroy Plateau, a northern Sydney suburb.

Work by the physicist David Forbes Martyn showed that temperatures peak in the Sun's corona at one million degrees.

To overcome the limitations of the available antennas, Pawsey used sea interferometry and began observations at Dover Heights which provided a better vantage point than Collaroy.

[4] His subordinate Paul Wild, who in 1971 became division chief, said: Joe Pawsey was the ... father of radio astronomy in Australia.

At each meeting of the IAU, at each important symposium on radio-astronomy, highly competent specialists such as Wild, Smerd and Christianson, headed by the dynamic personality of ... Pawsey, were able to announce spectacular progress.

He was appointed as director of the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory in 1962, but he died in Sydney of a brain tumour before he took office.