| 5th of August 2019 |
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| Peter McGregor Prize awarded to DiFX team |
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The Peter McGregor Prize
is awarded by the Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA) in
recognition of the design, invention or improvement of astronomical
instrumentation and associated software techniques that have enabled
significant advances in any areas of astronomy. The prize is normally
awarded every three years.
This year the Prze was awarded to Adam Deller and the Distributed FX Correlator (DiFX) team. DiFX is a software correlator, a package that combines the signals from an array of radio antennas into a functioning telescope. DiFX has been adopted by major radio astronomy observatories internationally, and the open-access nature of the software has lowered the barrier for the development of radio interferometers by smaller teams. The DiFX collaboration is led by Adam Deller, who developed the first version of the code as part of his PhD at Swinburne University, and includes Walter Alef, James Anderson, Matthias Bark, Matthew Bailes, Walter Brisken, Roger Cappallo, Geoff Crew, Richard Dodson, Dave Gordon, Zheng Meyer-Zhao, John Morgan, Chris Phillips, Cormac Reynolds, Jon Romney, Helge Rottman, John Spitzak, Matteo Stagni, Steven Tingay, Jan Wagner, Mark Wainright, Randall Wayth. More details are available from the OzGrav webpages. The image above shows Cath Trott, ASA President, presenting the award to Adam Deller at the ASA Conference Dinner last month. |