Professor Ronald Ekers has had an internationally distinguished career involving research in radio astronomy and radio astronomical techniques. He has been involved in a wide range of innovative experiments involving radio observations of the sun, planets, stars, galaxies, and quasars. These included the first measurements of the gravitational deflection of radio waves, the discovery of the hot gas spiralling around the nucleus of our galaxy and the discovery of a halo of cosmic ray electrons surrounding a spiral galaxy. Before returning to Australia as the foundation director of the CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility, he was the director of the Very Large Array, operated by the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory.