Robert Hanbury Brown, AC FRS[1] (31 August 1916 – 16 January 2002) was a British astronomer and physicist born in Aruvankadu, India.

Hanbury Brown was one of the main designers of the Narrabri Stellar Intensity Interferometer and received a number of honours and awards for his work.

At Brighton Technical College, Hanbury Brown studied for an external Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of London, which he received at the age of 19.

[3][4] By 1947 a consultancy that had been set up by Sir Robert Watson-Watt, the father of radar, offered more interesting prospects for the conversion of wartime developments into peacetime technologies.

After considering his career possibilities, Hanbury Brown joined Bernard Lovell's radio astronomy group at the University of Manchester in 1949 to work on his PhD.

[2] Despite opposition from some in the scientific community who argued that his predictions violated the laws of physics, Hanbury Brown and Twiss showed that their theory was correct through a number of observations.

In March 1960 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and in 1971 was awarded their Hughes Medal for " his efforts in developing the optical stellar intensity interferometer and for his observations of Spica".