New ARC-CSIRO
postdoctoral fellowships announced
The results for the inaugural round of Linkage-Australian Postdoctoral Fellowships (CSIRO) were announced in April. The fellowships are co-funded by the ARC and CSIRO. Ten of these new fellowships were awarded, their purpose being to promote increased collaboration between CSIRO and Universities. We were indeed fortunate that two astronomy applicants, Virginia Kilborn and Tony Wong were among the successful candidates. We congratulate them, and the associated chief investigators, for their fine achievement!
Dr Tony Wong's project is entitled "Star Formation at Millimetre Wavelengths with the CSIRO Australia Telescope" and was proposed by Dr Michael Burton (UNSW) and Prof Ray Norris (ATNF). Tony has been a Bolton Fellow at ATNF headquarters near Epping since the beginning of 2001. Prior to that he was a PhD student at the University of California at Berkeley working on observations of CO in galaxies with the BIMA millimetre array. A major portion of Tony's work at ATNF has been directed toward developing and utilising the 3-mm system at the Compact Array. As an ARC/CSIRO fellow, he will continue to be involved in the ATCA mm-upgrade, using it to image star-forming regions in our Galaxy and the LMC at high angular resolution. He will also help promote the CSIRO-UNSW collaboration in millimetre astronomy with the Mopra 22-m telescope, helping to develop new mapping techniques and commission the broadband correlator expected for completion in 2004. Finally, Tony will continue to pursue long-standing research interests in the interstellar medium and star-formation in nearby galaxies. He will be dividing his time roughly equally between ATNF and UNSW starting in August 2003.
Dr Virginia Kilborn's project is "The Evolution of Gas in Galaxy Groups" and was proposed by Dr Duncan Forbes (Swinburne) and Dr Baerbel Koribalski (ATNF) together with partner investigators Dr Steve Tingay and Dr Brad Gibson (Swinburne) and Prof Ken Freeman (RSAA, ANU). Virginia has just completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Jodrell Bank (University of Manchester) and is well known to the Australian community, having previously completed a HIPASS PhD at the University of Melbourne. The aim of Virginia's project is to define the gaseous, stellar and dark matter content of galaxy groups and, in combination with simulations, help understand the evolutionary processes involved in group formation. Virginia will be using Parkes HI and ATCA HI and mm observations for her project. She will be based at Swinburne University, though will regularly visit the ATNF. Virginia will commence her appointment in August 2003.
The ARC selection report is publicly listed at: www.arc.gov.au/htm/selection_report_L-APDC.htm . We hope that this scheme will continue next year. These are joint University-CSIRO positions, and candidates can request to be hosted at a University or at the ATNF.
Lister Staveley-Smith
(Lister.Staveley-Smith@csiro.au)