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Welcome New Scientific Staff (1Mar94) (from NSO, NOAO Newsletter No. 37, 1 March 1994) Sydney D'Silva, formerly with the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), joined the NSO staff on 30 November 1993. His interests mainly surround the question of deciphering the nature of the sub-surface connection and structure of surface magnetic features, particularly sunspots, plages, and ephemeral regions, (a) through the study of the dynamics of flux-tubes, and (b) through helioseismic studies. His other interests might involve working out new schemes of data-gap filling, particularly in the context of the GONG data. Christoph Keller arrived on 3 January 1994. He received his PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich in 1992, where he held a post-doc position until the end of 1993. He is currently working on high-resolution observations of solar magnetic elements and the spectroscopy of intra-network field. His interests include the design of instruments and image restoration in general. Yuhong Fan has joined the NSO/Tucson staff as a Post-doctoral Fellow starting 1 December 1993. She received her PhD in Astronomy last fall at the Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii. Her dissertation, completed under the supervision of George Fisher, was on modeling the dynamic evolution of rising active region flux tubes through the solar convective envelope. Yuhong plans to continue her work on flux tube dynamics by comparing the results of numerical simulations with observational data to understand the physical origin of various properties of active regions and their implications for the solar dynamo. Accompanying Yuhong is her husband, Douglas Braun, who has joined the NSO extended staff through the Solar Physics Research Corporation. Doug is no stranger to the NSO community, having spent one year in residence as a NRC Post- doctoral Fellow under the supervision of Tom Duvall in 1989. Doug returns to us after serving four years as Assistant Astronomer at the University of Hawaii. Doug's primary research interests lie in the field of local helioseismology, whereby observations of solar p-mode oscillations are used to probe localized inhomogeneities in the solar atmosphere and interior such as sunspots and subsurface magnetic fields. Yeming Gu has also joined the extended NSO scientific staff through the Solar Physics Research Corporation. Yeming arrived in December from the Physics Department of the University of Arizona, where he did his PhD thesis research in computational problems in solar interior modeling based on helioseismic observations. He is working at NSO on problems in LTE radiative transfer through inhomogeneous atmospheres and in computational techniques in local helioseismology. Andrew Jones arrived at NSO on 12 January to join the "South Pole" group (Stuart Jefferies, Jack Harvey and Tom Duvall). He will be helping with the instrumentation, and also the reduction and analysis of data from the earlier trips. Andrew's background is in both stellar and solar seismology. On the solar side he has been involved heavily with both the LOI and GOLF instruments for SOHO, as well as working on the SLOT/SLOE ground-based, low-degree intensity oscillations measurements. On the stellar side he has tried several approaches to measuring "solar-type" oscillations. Though it may be possible to detect stellar p-modes from the ground, he is uncertain whether any real science will come from this, as we will always be restricted to only the very brightest stars. So again we have to turn to space missions, and he was part of the study team for the failed PRISMA proposal, and now finds himself PI on the STARS proposal. This will aim to observe many thousands of stars with very high photometric precision, and by concentrating measurements in open clusters a real advance in our understanding of stellar structure and evolution may come. Jacques Beckers, Ann Barringer
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