Ron Probst, from the IR group in Tucson, is just completing a sabbatical year with us at CTIO. He and his family have enjoyed their extended visit to Chile so much that they will be staying with us for another three years before transferring back to Tucson. This internal NOAO transfer mirrors the transfer of Jay Elias from CTIO to the USGPO earlier this year as Project Scientist for the Gemini IR spectrometer. Ron will initially have special responsibility for the transfer of the Cryogenic Optical Bench (with new 512 x 512 array and Wildfire controller) to Chile and its operation with the new f/14 tip-tilt secondary on the Blanco 4-m.
Richard Elston will be leaving us at the end of the year to join the new infrared group at the University of Florida. He has played a major role in driving several aspects of CTIO's instrumentation program as well as helping CTIO return to an international level in IR astronomy. He has also proved to be a stimulating research scientist. Partly as a result of Richard's imminent departure and the desire to prepare for an increase in the level of IR activity at CTIO over the next few years, we are advertising for two new tenure-track positions at CTIO (see following announcement).
Rene Mendez, a Chilean astronomer who obtained his PhD from Yale and is currently working as a postdoc at the European Southern Observatory in Garching, will be joining us for four years (beginning next March) as the first "CTIO/Chile Fellow." Rene's research interests are in the kinematical and dynamical description of stellar populations in the Galaxy, and how this constrains theories of Galactic formation.
Malcolm Smith, Mark Phillips (msmith@noao.edu, mphillips@noao.edu)