David John Axon (born 1951) is a British astrophysicist, professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York, and is currently Head of the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Sussex. He received his BSc (Physics) and PhD (Astronomy) degrees from the University of Durham. David Axon held postdoctoral positions at the University of Sussex and Cambridge University, and was an ESA scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, before becoming Chair of the Department of Physics at the University of Hertfordshire in 1999. From 2002-2008 he was Chair of the Department of Physics at RIT. He maintains a research chair at Hertfordshire.
David Axon is a leading expert in the field of astronomical polarimetry and the physics of active galactic nuclei. His scientific accomplishments include discovery of the first, X-ray selected BL Lac object;[1] discovery of the first "superwind" galaxy;[2] and discovery of strong magnetic fields in the jets of young stellar objects.[3]