Darragh O’Donoghue received his PhD degree from the University of Cape Town in 1982, where he continued post-Doctoral work on white dwarfs, especially pulsating examples, and cataclysmic variables. Since 1999 he has been Head of Instrumentation at SAAO. He has been involved in follow-up studies of X-ray surveys as well as the Edinburgh-Cape ultraviolet excess survey which led to the discovery of an entirely new class of pulsating sub dwarf stars. More recently he has been involved in the optical redesign of SALT (Southern African Large Telescope) as well as Principal Investigator of the SALT Imaging Camera SALTICAM. He is author or co-author of 122 publications in refereedjournals.