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CTIO Scientific Staff Comings and Goings---and an ... (1Sep95)
Upcoming Job Vacancy
(from CTIO, NOAO Newsletter No. 43, September 1995)

Several changes are taking place in the scientific staff at CTIO. Much
of what follows concentrates on their professional activities. Space
constraints limit what could also be said about the more human side of
their many contributions to life at the observatory and in the local
and international community.

Following the departure of Chris Smith (now at the University of
Michigan) in February, John Filhaber joined us on 1 March from Columbia
University, where he worked in their program of satellite-based UV
instrumentation. He worked both for CARSO and as the Canadian observer
on Las Campanas. He is already heavily involved in work on upgrading
the image quality of the 4-m telescope, and will provide some
much-needed continuity to this effort during Jack Baldwin's 12-month
sabbatical leave in 1996. He is also the engineer responsible for most
of the support and upgrade activity on the smaller telescopes, as well
as covering a wide variety of optical design activities.

In mid-July we held a farewell party for Jay Elias, Mario Hamuy and
Andy Layden. Jay Elias will be taking sabbatical leave at NASA Ames
until the end of the year and will then transfer to Tucson as project
scientist for the Gemini Infrared Spectrometer. He has made major
contributions in the study of young stars in the Taurus and Ophiuchus
dark clouds, in spectroscopy of nova and supernovae, and in
standardization of near-IR photometry. He has been the leader of the IR
instrumentation program at CTIO for many years. His current area of
research includes studies of AGB stars in the LMC and SMC.

Mario Hamuy has been awarded one of the new Gemini Fellowships. He has
elected to use it to support studies for a PhD at the Steward
Observatory. He did his MS in the University of Chile's Department of
Astronomy on UBVRI integrated photometry of globular Clusters. Since
1987, he has worked with many of the CTIO staff astronomers on
photometric and spectroscopic studies of SN1987A and other supernovae.
He has recently published an important study of the Hubble diagram for
distant Type Ia supernovae. He has also played a major role in recent
efforts to control light pollution in the Cerro Tololo and Cerro
Pachon area.

Andy Layden is moving to Canada to work with Bill Harris' globular
cluster group at McMaster University in Hamilton. He joined CTIO in
November 1992, immediately after completing his PhD thesis at Yale
(with Bob Zinn) on the metallicities and kinematics of nearby RR Lyrae
stars. At CTIO he has been working on four projects involving the
study of RR Lyrae stars in different regions of the galaxy. He has
also worked on the photometric properties of the newly-discovered
Sagittarius dwarf galaxy and its globular clusters. His work looking
after the CTIO photometers will be taken over by a combination of Olin
Eggen and Oscar Saa.

Ron Probst has arrived at CTIO from Tucson to take up a
quasi-sabbatical year---just in time to help cover some of the gap left
by Jay's departure. He will spend about three quarters of his time on
research, including studies with a wide-field infrared camera.

We are expecting to hire a scientist to join the CTIO infrared group
at or shortly after the time Ron leaves Chile. Advertisements are
likely to be issued in October, with a selection made in February and
a starting date around August or September 1996.

Nick Suntzeff and Tom Ingerson return from sabbaticals at the Dominion
Astrophysical Observatory in Canada towards the end of this year and
by June 1996 respectively.

Michael Keane, from the University of California, Santa Cruz, will be
joining us mid-August. His PhD work included considerable involvement
in the very successful HIRES echelle spectrometer for the Keck
Observatory. He will be spending about half time on his own research
projects into the properties of quasars, active galaxies and the
intergalactic medium.

Alejandro Clocchiatti (currently a student at Texas) has been granted
a Gemini Fellowship to join us at CTIO in mid-September. It is a
one-year fellowship which is renewable for a second year. Alejandro,
who is from Argentina, has been carrying out an observational thesis
on Type Ib/Ic supernovae under Craig Wheeler.

Malcolm G. Smith

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