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Dr. Vassilis Charmandaris is currently a staff
astronomer at the Astronomy
Department of Cornell
University.
Vassilis grew up in Greece
and came to the United States in 1989, after obtaining
a B.Sc. in Physics from the University
of Thessaloniki. In graduate school he focussed
on the star formation properties and kinematics
of collisional
ring galaxies and received his Ph.D. in astrophysics
from Iowa
State Univerity in 1995. Realizing that the
perception that ``the Iowa winters are not as
cold at they used to be'' was simply a result
of his long stay in the midwest, he decided to reward
himself and slightly change environment by returning
to Europe to get a postdoct position in Paris,
France. He worked for a year at the Service
d'Astrophysique at CEA Saclay and he was then
awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship and moved for another
two years to the millimeter astronomy department
(DEMIRM) of the Observatoire
de Paris.
During his stay in France, his research interests
evolved around questions related to how the properties
of dust and molecular gas in interacting galaxies
affect the formation of massive stars in them. He
has been addressing those questions using mainly
data obtained by telescopes in space, such as the
Hubble and the Infrared
Space Observatory. However, he also tries to
seize the opportunity to use millimeter and radio
telescopes in the mountains of Chile,
Spain, and Hawaii
to make more observations which are often essential
in order to get a complete picture of what really
happens in those galaxies.
Vassilis moved back to the western side of the
Atlantic at Cornell
University in August of 1999, but he often finds
professional reasons to spend some time with his
old collaborators in Paris. He is a member of the
group which has built IRS,
the mid-infrared spectrograph of the Space
Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF). SIRTF is
the fourth and final element in NASA's family of
"Great Observatories," expected to be
launched into space within the next two years.
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