I am currently employed as a senior research scientist and project manager at the University of Southern California. Working in the Space Science Center I am helping to develop new instrument concepts for solar UV/EUV measurements, and analysis of the existing data from SoHO, Space Shuttle and sounding rocket instruments. Current projects include the Optics Free Spectrometer (OFS) and EUV Spectro Photometer (ESP) part of the EVE package for the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory. I am also helping to develop a double transmission grating EUV spectrometer, and managing payload development for the USC Space Sciences Center sounding rocket program. I was part of the ground support team for the Solar Extreme Ultraviolet Hitchhiker (SEH) instrument flown on the STS-95 Space Shuttle Discovery flight (with John Glenn). The flight was an outstanding success, and the instrument performed flawlessly. I participated in the preparation and launch of the 36.181US sounding rocket on August 18 1999 at White Sands Missile Range, another very successful flight to both calibrate SoHO instruments, and to flight prove a new Optics Free Spectrometer (OFS) I helped to develop.
I am also working on instrumentation, observations and data reduction of helioseismic data from Mount Wilson, the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory, Taiwan Oscillations Network (TON), and the SOI/MDI experiment on SoHO. The work has two main focuses, the development and exploitation of local helioseismology as a means to understand the coupling of rotation, convection, and magnetic fields that gives rise to the solar cycle. The development of new spectral estimation tools that hold the promise of better efficiency than the Fourier transform methods currently employed. These methods can extract more information from the data than traditional methods. The techniques we are developing have applications in many fields from medical imaging to the analysis of seismic data for oil exploration.
Working with Judit Pap, Roger Ulrich at UCLA and Jeff Kuhn at the University of Hawaii I am helping to develop a space instrument to precisely measure the solar limb shape and its long term changes. As leader of the instrument design team of the APT (Astrometric and Photometric Telescope), I am working on the instrument concept development and planning possible mission scenarios. Such measurements are essential to understand the impact of long and short term solar variability on the Earth's climate.
I continue to contribute to mission definitions and the design of experiments for asteroseismology and planetary search,and am a member of the MONS (Measuring Oscillations in Nearby Stars) Science Consortium.
February 1995 - January 1996. I was the `winter-over' scientist working at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, with responsibility for the AMANDA, SNMP, GASP, SPACE-1, SPASE-2 and VULCAN experiments. These experiments are studying air-showers by either watching for air Cerenkov (GASP, VULCAN) or detecting the muon cascade as it interacts at or near the Earth's surface (SPASE 1 & 2, and AMANDA), though AMANDA's primary goal is to eventually detect neutrinos filtered through the Earth. The SNMP experiment uses the same detector strings as AMANDA (which comprises four strings of photomultiplier tubes buried at up to 2 km depth in the ice) but looks for `anomalous' events that could signal supernovae or indicate the existence of magnetic monopoles.
As well as the scientific duties, there are general maintenance and safety aspects of life on the station of 28 people in an extremely hostile environment, including fire fighting and emergency medical training.
To improve the safety for personnel on the station I designed, built and installed a fail-safe alarm system that was triggered by the various station fire and hazard alarms. It allowed the emergency to be quickly identified, and sounded alarms around the station. I also rebuilt all the emergency flash lamps, to withstand the extreme temperature conditions experienced at the South Pole. The emergency flash lamps are critical safety items for the station personnel in the winter.
January 1994 - February 1995. I was employed by the Bartol Research Institute of the University of Delaware, (working at the National Solar Observatory in Tucson) where I developed an instrument to measure solar velocity and intensity oscillations simultaneously from the geographic south pole. The instrument was operated during the Austral Summer (1994-1995) at the south pole, and worked very reliably and provided an excellent uninterrupted data set. I also worked on reduction, deconvolution and fitting techniques for analyzing high-l helioseismic data from various instruments.
November 1992 - December 1993 Kapteyn Sterrenwacht, Roden, The Netherlands. I continued the development of the Holographic Heterodyne Spectrometer (HHS), started at the University of Århus, by testing and developing alignment methods for the interferometer block. I also constructed the first prototype HHS instruments. I helped to develop a software ray-tracing package to simulate the interference patterns expected from this type of interferometer, but the software is general enough to simulate most types of optical systems. The software runs under UNIX on many machines from personal workstations to supercomputers.
1992 IAF (Astronomy Department of the University of Århus). During this post-doctoral fellowship, I helped develop the Holographic Heterodyne Spectrometer (HHS) for asteroseismology. This is a joint development between the University of Århus, the Kapteyn Observatory (Roden, Netherlands) and the Observatoire de Nice (Nice, France). My involvement was in the areas of optical/mechanical and electronic design of the system. Due to the unusually good weather in Århus in March - July I was also involved with an observation campaign of two Scuti stars from the university observatory in Århus. This experience shows the possibilities of conducting state of the art measurements from small telescopes at non optimal sites and has led to an initiative to set up a network of small telescopes with CCD cameras to observe Scuti stars (STACC -- A Small Telescope Array with CCD Cameras). I also developed a multi color CCD photometer to provide multi color simultaneous photometry on a single CCD detector. The work was initiated to try to reduce scintillation noise in asteroseismology studies, but has many other uses. The observing campaign included many members of the department and provided an ideal opportunity to teach students about observation, instrumentation and data reduction techniques.
1991 August 1st - December 31st IAS (Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale), Orsay. Post Rouge appointment to help develop and calibrate the GOLF instrument to be flown on the SoHO satellite. Early in the work, problems with stray light were found. These were isolated, and either cured or understood, so that in later models they did not cause a problem. Other responsibilities included developing various optical techniques for aligning the instrument and instructing the IAS team on how to align and use an argon ion pumped dye laser.
1991 ESA ESTEC. As a consultant I helped develop the active guider for Luminosity Oscillations Imager (LOI), and assess the performance of photo diode detector technologies. I also developed redundancy schemes for the data acquisition electronics.
1989 - 1990 IAC (Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias). Post-doctoral visiting scientist. I designed a very high precision differential photometer for studying stellar oscillations in addition to carrying out more fundamental work on the behavior of optical fibers, guiding systems and adaptive optics, and detectors.
Work I started on an adaptive optics system has been continued and now forms the basis of the `Correlador Solar', an image stabilization system that has successfully been used at both the VTT solar telescope at Izaña, and on the SVST on La Palma.
I also developed a solar IR solar photometer in collaboration with Torben Larsen of the University of Oslo, with the aim of setting up a small network of IR photometers to measure solar oscillations.
1986 - 1989 European Space Agency (ESA ESTEC). As a post-doctoral visiting scientist together with Bo Andersen, I developed the Luminosity Oscillations Imager (LOI) part of the VIRGO instrument flown on the NASA/ESA SoHO satellite. This involved the entire mechanical and electronic design of a prototype instrument (tested at Izaña, Tenerife). I developed two analogue hybrid circuits for the LOI data acquisition subsystem. For the WIND and LOI instruments I developed the first space qualified Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) this design was also used to space qualify the ABB HAFO ASIC production facility, and my chip is now in commercial production. My work on this project was rewarded with anESA Outstanding Achievement Award in 1990.
Summer 1982 University of East Anglia. Development of a computer interface for a Perkin Elmer IR spectrometer for the chemistry undergraduate teaching laboratories. The system recorded and displayed spectra, and allowed `fingerprinting' analysis from a data base of standard spectra.
1979 - 1980 Mann Components Limited. Quality assurance technician. I developed methods for testing and predicting reliability of very high ohmic value resistors.