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Center for Space Science and Technology
News
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2009 Mar 16
Very sadly, CSST's Senior Research Scientist
Dr. David Band
passed
away this evening. He was a member of the UMBC research faculty since 2001,
having previously worked at Havard, UCSD & Los Alamos.
David performed research on
X-ray binaries and AGN, but is probably best known for
his work on Gamma-ray bursts - and especially for the "Band function" spectral
form.
In recent years David made many important contributions
to the community as a member of the Fermi
Science Support Center at NASA/GSFC.
David leaves a wife, and two children. He will be greatly missed.
2009 Feb 20
Dr. Meng Chiao
joins CSST as a member
of the
CRESST consortium.
Meng joins us after working for several years in industry. Her research
interests focus on the design and development of the cryogenics and associated
hardware required for the transition-edge sensor research underway for future
astrophysical missions.
2009 Feb 16
Dr. Thomas Nelson
joins CSST.
Tommy joins UMBC having recently completed his PhD at the Univ. Wisconsin-Madison.
He will be continuing his studies of shell-burning white dwarfs in the optical,
UV and X-ray bands, along with other classes of compact Galactic systems.
This research will be performed in close collaboration with Koji Mukai.
2009 Feb 09
Dr. Stephen Smith
joins CSST as a member
of the
CRESST consortium.
Stephen joins us having been an NPP at GSFC since 2006. His research
interests include the fabrication & testing of transition-edge sensors,
vacuum & cryogenic systems, and signal processing algorithms
2008 Oct 11
Dr. Markos Georganopoulos'
CRESST-related task has been successfully completed.
However Markos remains as a tenure-track faculty member at UMBC, and
is continuing to develop close collaborations with many GSFC-based scientists.
2008 Oct 10
Congratulations to Dr. Kai-Wing Chan
on his promotion to an Associate Research Scientist.
2008 Sep 17
Congratulations to Dr. James van Meter
on his promotion to an Assistant Research Scientist.
2008 Sep 01
Dr. Ozlem Celik
joins CSST as a member
of the
CRESST consortium.
Ozlem joins UMBC having completed her PhD at UCLA. She will be working
with the Fermi (formerly GLAST) Large Area Telescope team
at NASA/GSFC in studies of Gamma-ray bursts, the diffuse Gamma-ray emission
(Galactic and Extra-Galactic), and on the search for signatures of
Dark Matter.
2008 Sep 01
Dr. Vlasios Vasileiou
joins CSST as a member
of the
CRESST consortium.
Vlasios joins UMBC having completed his PhD at UMCP. He will be working
with the Fermi (formerly GLAST) Large Area Telescope team
at NASA/GSFC in studies of Gamma-ray bursts, the diffuse Gamma-ray emission
(Galactic and Extra-Galactic), and on the search for signatures of
Dark Matter.
2008 Aug 01
Dr. Thomas Hams
joins CSST as a member
of the
CRESST consortium.
Thomas transfers from USRA, having been at GSFC since 2002. He is an
instrumental physicist with over 12 years of expertise in
experimental particle physics. During his time at GSFC, Thomas has been
involved primarily in the development of the superconducting spectrometer
for the BESS-Polar balloon payload. Specifically he took the leading role
in the design, integration and testing of the Aerogel Cherenkov Counters
and associated hard-vacuum photomultiplier tubes. To date the instrument
has made two successful long-duration flights over Antarctica, the latest
of which (~30 days) collected ~5 billion cosmic ray events.
2008 Jul 16
Dr. Keigo Fukumura
joins CSST as a member
of the
CRESST consortium.
Keigo
has spent the last two years at GSFC on an NPP working with Demos
Kazanas to develop a set of analytical tools to simulate the interaction
of the “primary” X- & Gamma-ray radiation with the outflowing winds from
accretion disks surrounding black holes. These tools include a realistic
2-D geometry and ionization structure for the illuminated wind. As part of
CRESST, Keigo will contnue working with Demos to be further develop these
and other tools, and apply them to observational data.
2008 Jul 01
Dr. Joseph Adams
joins CSST as a member
of the
CRESST consortium.
Joe is an experimental physicist specializing in instrument
development. Following work at MIT Lincoln Labs on time-of-flight laser
radar systems, he came to GSFC in 2005 to work on low-temperature
detectors and related instrumentation. He is leading the detector
development for a forthcoming sounding-rocket experiment (in collaboration
with MIT & NIST) to fly a Transition-Edge Sensor (TES) for the first time.
Joe is also involved in GSFC’s EBIT experiment at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory studying plasmas under conditions similar to those
observed astrophysically.
2008 Jun 23
Congratulations to
Drs. Chan, Hamaguchi & Mukai
as members of the SXS team selected for funding by NASA.
The Soft X-ray Spectrometer will fly on Astro-H (formerly NeXT)
scheuled to launch in 2013 [More..].
2008 Jun 11
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Go GLAST!
The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope
(GLAST) was launched at
12:05 EDT today from the Cape on a Delta-II.
CRESST@UMBC
has 6 Faculty members heavily involved in the
GLAST mission,
and many more looking forward to making use of the facility.
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2008 May 01
Dr. Fotis Gariil's
work on magnetar-like X-ray bursts from the young pulsar PSR J18460258 in the
SNR Kes 75 is featured in the June issue of Sky & Telescope. The original paper appeared in
the March 28th issue of Science. The article also appeared in ScienceXpress (Feb 21), and was a NASA/GSFC News "Top Story" in Feb.
2008 Mar 10
Dr. James Felton
joins CSST as an Adjunct member
of the
CRESST consortium.
Jim has been a working at NASA/GSFC in various capacities for many years, and
has written several seminal works in high-energy astrophysics.
2008 Mar 03
Dr. Kenji Hamaguchi
joins CSST as a member
of the
CRESST consortium.
Kenji has been working at NASA/GSFC since 2002, first as an NRC fellow,
then as a USRA scientist. Kenji's research areas include
young stellar objects, wind-wind interactions in massive binary systems, and
astrobiology. He is also a member of the
Suzaku
GOF.
2008 Feb 15
Dr. Seunghee Son
joins CSST as a member
of the
CRESST consortium.
Seunghee has been at NASA/GSFC since 2006 as an NPP. The focus of her work is
the development of the 3-DTI instrument, where she has made a major
contribution to the construction and characterization of the prototype
instrument, and currently leads the development of the front-end
electronics.
As part of CRESST,
Seunghee will continue working on the development of 3-DTI, starting with
the design of track-reconstruction software.
2007 Oct 01
Dr. Fotis Gavriil
joins CSST as a member
of the
CRESST consortium.
Fotis has been at NASA/GSFC since 2005 as an NPP. He is an expert in the field of highly-magnetized, neutron stars (commonly known as magnetars), including candidate sources such Anomalous X-ray Pulsars (AXPs) and Soft-Gamma Repeaters (SGRs).
As part of
CRESST, Fotis will
continue such studies using
RXTE,
Chandra
and
XMM-Newton
observations.
2007 Oct 01
Dr. Takanori Sakamoto
joins CSST as a member
of the
CRESST consortium.
Taka has been at NASA/GSFC since 2004, and is a
Swift BAT team member. He is involved in a development of the automatic
pipeline scripts of the BAT GRB data and also in on-board calibration
of the energy response matrices of the BAT. His primary science
interest is the radiation process of the prompt GRB emission, and is
collecting multiwavelength data to investigate
the spectral and temporal characteristics of the prompt GRB
emission. He is also interested in using GRBs as a cosmological tool.
2007 Oct 01
Dr. Katja Pottschmidt
joins CSST as a member
of the
CRESST consortium
working in the INTEGRAL
GOF at NASA/GSFC.
Previously, Katja worked as a member of the RXTE-HEXTE team at
the University of California, San Diego and prior to that as an
archive scientist at the
INTEGRAL Science Data Centre in
Versoix, near Genèva
Switzerland. Her main research
interest are X-ray binaries, especially black hole binaries and
accreting X-ray pulsars, using high resolution X-ray timing analysis
including higher order Fourier statistics. Katja also
studies the accretion columns and magnetic fields of X-ray pulsars by
modeling their broad band spectra, including cyclotron resonance
scattering features.
2007 Sep 30
Dr. Jim Chiang
leaves CSST
to become a Research Software Developer
at the
GLAST
Instrument
Science Operations Center (ISOC) at
the Stanford
Linear Accelerator Center,
California.
In this position Jim will continue his contributions to the GLAST
Science Support Center (GSSC) activities, with an emphasis on the
development and testing of the science analysis software and
exploration of analysis methodologies.
Thanks & Best Wishes Jim!
2007 Sep 14
Dr. Wayne Baumgartner
joins CSST as a member
of the
CRESST consortium,
joining us after a postdoctoral position at Caltech working
on CZT detectors for the hard X-ray missions HEFT and NuStar. Prior to
that, Wayne worked at GSFC on the balloon mission InFOCuS, and on
X-ray determinations of the elemental abundances in galaxy clusters. In
his new position with the Swift BAT team Wayne will be working on the
BAT hard X-ray survey and concentrating on the science surrounding
highly obscured AGN.
2007 Jul 30
Dr. Tim Norton
joins CSST as a member of the
CRESST consortium.
Tim has worked on astronomical instrumentation development for over 21
years. At the ROE he was involved with the development of a Long Wave
Telescope Simulator which was later used to calibrate the sub-millimeter
SCUBA instruments at the JCMT in Hawaii. He then worked at Imperial
College (London) on the development of a UV sensitive photon-counting
imaging detector system which subsequently flew on XMM-Newton and
Swift/UVOT. Tim has been at GSFC since 1995, working on the development of
novel readout systems and high quantum efficiency photoemissive layers for
UV sensitive photon-counting detectors and more recently development of
NIR sensitive detectors for missions including TPF and SNAP-JDEM/Destiny.
2007 Jul 02
Dr. Robin Corbet
joins CSST as a member of the
CRESST consortium.
Robin transfers from USRA, having been at GSFC since 1994.
He is an expert in the fields of X-ray binaries and
spacecraft operations. He has been the Chief Duty Scientist for the
RXTE Science Operations Center for many years, and also is
the Operations Lead for
the GLAST Science Support Center. Astrophysically, Robin
is perhaps most famous for the "Corbet Diagram" which illustrates the
relationship between spin & orbital periods in binary
pulsars. However he has also made many important contributions in the
fields of anomalous & ultra-slow X-ray pulsars, as well as developing
new analysis & diagnostic techniques.
2007 Jul 01
Dr. Markos Georganopoulos
joins
the
CRESST consortium as a member of the UMBC Physics Faculty.
Markos has been at GSFC since 2002, and has been affiliated with UMBC
since 2004. He is an expert in broad-band synchrotron and IC emission from
relativistic flows. For CRESST, Markos will be working part time with
GSFC's Rita Sambruna on the theoretical interpretation of Chandra
observations of radio loud objects. In October, Markos will also be
working part time on the development of his theoretical 'toolbox' in
support of the GLAST LAT team, and GLAST user community as a whole.
2007 Jun 23
Ms. Virginia Peles
joins CSST as the
CRESST
Program Coordinator
at
"CRESST-Central"
at NASA/GSFC.
Virginia (Ginny) has been working for many years under the USRA space
science programs with GSFC, so she is very familiar with our
environment and the needs of the CRESST scientific personnel.
Generally, her responsibilities will be to provide administrative
support to the entire CRESST Program, which includes various duties
that will be of direct and indirect help to our on-site scientists.
2007 Jun 23
Dr. Georgia de Nolfo
joins CSST as a member of the
CRESST consortium.
Georgia transfers from USRA, having been at GSFC since 2000.
She is an expert on gas microwell detectors used to track gamma-rays
& neutrons in 3D. She is currently working on the testing
& characterization of 3-DTI prototype instrument with the long term
goal of developing a larger instrument for balloon and space
flights. Georgia is also involved in studies of the intensity and
modulation of light isotopes produced by spallation of Galactic
Cosmic Rays (GCRs) using ACE/CRIS observations, and also
observations of heavier GCRs obtained during flights of TIGER.
2007 Apr 23
Dr. Kai-Wing Chan
joins CSST as a member of the
CRESST consortium.
Kai transfers from USRA, having been at GSFC since 1995. He is an expert in
X-ray optics and played a major role developing the thin-shell XRTs for
the original Astro-E, and for Suzaku. He is currently working
on various aspects oof the mirrors for Constellation-X. Kai's astronomical
research interests include Gamma-ray & positron transport in young SNe,
and Galactic nucleosynthesis,
2007 Apr 02
Dr. Steve Sturner
joins CSST as a member of the
CRESST consortium.
Steve is our third transfers from USRA. He has been at GSFC since 1997 working
within the INTEGRAL GOF and has recently been promoted to become the
Lead Scientist of the GOF. He is also Co-I on the SPI instrument on
INTEGRAL. His primary research interests are the multiwavelength
modeling of the non-thermal emission from SNRs, and radiative processes
in radio pulsars and XRBs. He also has interests in the diffuse MeV emission
and Cosmic-ray interactions with outer bodies in the Solar system.
2007 Mar 31
Dr. Volker Beckmann
leaves
CSST to take up a position as Operations Coordinator at the
INTEGRAL Science Data Centre in
Versoix, near Genèva
Switzerland. Volker was at UMBC for 4 years, and made
significant contributions to both our research and educations activities.
Thanks & Best wishes Volker!
2007 Mar 19
Dr. Koji Mukai
joins CSST as a member of the
CRESST consortium.
Koji transfers to us from USRA. He has been at GSFC since 1992 working
within the Guest Observer Facilities (GOFs) of several X-ray missions. He is
an expert in the use, calibration and software associated with X-ray
CCDs, and currently managing the
Suzaku
GOF.
Koji's primary research
area is X-ray and multiwaveband studies of magnetic CVs, and other
interacting binaries.
2007 Jan 29
Mr. David Havrilla
joins CSST as the
Business Manager for
"CRESST Central" at NASA/GSFC.
David joins us having worked for NASA for many years, most recently as a
Supervisory Program Manager in the Office of Education at HQ.
2007 Jan 15
Ms. Lynne Griffith
joins CSST as the on-campus
Business Manager for
CRESST@UMBC.
Lynne joins us having previously been the Operations Manager of a nationwide
firm based in Towson. Lynne will deal with all aspects of
CSST/CRESST
operations at UMBC.
2007 Jan 15
Dr. John Lehan
joins CSST as a member of the
CRESST consortium.
John
transfers to us from USRA. He is an expert in optical measurement
technology and design, and a specialist in the design and testing of
anamorphic optical systems, thin film optics, sputtering and vacuum
deposition techniques. In addition, John is also an expert in
ultra-lightweight optics for space use, including grazing incidence X-ray
optics. John has been at GSFC for over 4 years, applying his expertise to
many projects within the X-ray Astrophysics Laboratory.
2007 Jan 01
Dr. Rick Arendt
joins CSST as a member of the
CRESST consortium.
Rick is
has been developing specialized software for several scientific
instruments of use within GSFCs Observational Cosmology Laboratory.
Specifically Rick is an expert on the NICMOS instrument on the Hubble
Space Telescope, on the IRAC instrument on board the Spitzer spacecraft,
and on the SHARC-II camera at the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory. In
all cases Rick has developed self-calibrating software to facilitate data
reduction and analysis. He has also developed Fast Fourier Transform code
to predict the throughput of the microshutter arrays on the NIRSPEC
instrument to fly on the James Webb Space Telescope. Rick's research area
is the modelling of the physical processes involved in the infra-red
emission and evolution of galaxies and supernova remnants.
2006 Oct 24
The CSST now has
several administrative job openings
2006 Sep 27
The CSST at UMBC is part of the
consortium
selected for
the NASA/GSFC
Center for Research and Exploration in
Space Science and Technology (CRESST).
Press Releases from
UMBC,
UMCP,
& USRA.
(more info coming soon...!)
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