Astbury became a professor at the University of Victoria, receiving significant funding for his research. He was joined by researchers from CERN. In 1986, he became a member of the Canadian National Science and Engineering Research Council grant selection committee and, in 1991, director of Canada's Institute for Particle Physics. He used his skills when becoming director of TRIUMF in 1994 to further direct Canadian involvement in CERN with contributions to the Large Hadron Collider ATLAS experiment, in addition to the continuing OPAL experiment of the Large Electron–Positron Collider.