Ivan King
(University of Washington)
Ivan King received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1952.
He was on the faculty of the University of Illinois
for several years, and then spent nearly three decades
teaching at the University of California at Berkeley,
where he retired in 1993. He is now a Research Professor
at the University of Washington. He has worked on
globular clusters for the entire length of his career.
It was he who initiated HST work on NGC 6397; at
the time, Adrienne Cool was his postdoc and Jay
Anderson his graduate student. The first task was
to delineate the color-magnitude diagram of the
cluster; next the team used proper motions to remove
field stars and push observations down to the lower
termination of the main sequence, where low-mass
stars are no longer able to burn hydrogen at their
centers. This was the first of a series of projects
in which Anderson and King developed new techniques
of HST astrometry.
Adrienne Cool
Principle Scientist
(SFSU)
Adrienne Cool is a native of New York City, and
received her undergraduate degree in physics at
Yale University. She spent a few years after college
working on medical imaging techniques, and then
went to Columbia University where she earned a Master's
degree in electrical engineering. During that time
she happened on some popular astronomy books and
decided that astronomy was for her. Adreinne bought
a pair of binoculars, learned the constellations
from her rooftop in Brooklyn, and went off to a
PhD program in astronomy at Harvard. She came to
the San Francisco Bay Area for a postdoc at Berkeley,
and has now pretty much adjusted to the ocean being
on the wrong side. She is currently an associate
professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy
at San Francisco State University, where she has
enjoyed studying both ordinary and extraordinary
stars in globular clusters with many wonderful students.
Josh Grindlay
(Harvard University)
Jonathan (Josh) Grindlay is the Robert Treat Paine
Professor of Practical Astronomy at Harvard and
is relieved to have just (July, '03) finished his
second time around as Department Chair. He has had
a long-standing interest in globular clusters as
the factories for producing compact X-ray binaries
-- all the way back to the primodial days of his
discovery of the first X-ray bursts from an accreting
neutron star in NGC 6624 using the non-imaging ANS
X-ray satellite in 1975. With the Einstein X-ray
Observatory he and his student Paul Hertz discovered
the large population of low luminosity X-ray sources
in globulars and suggested they were dominated by
CVs (accreting white dwarfs), but with some quiescent
neutron star binaries as well. This has been borne
out with followup studies with ROSAT and HST of
NGC 6397 with his student Adrienne Cool and now
in much higher resolution and more sensitive detail
with the recent high resolution studies he and his
students and colleagues have conducted with Chandra.
From their extensive Chandra (and HST) studies of
47Tuc and other globulars, as well as studies by
other groups, it is clear that the Chandra-HST combination
is a particularly effective direct probe of compact
binary and compact object production and dynamics
in globular clusters. When not pursuing the "Practical
Astronomy" of stellar collisions, he is now
conducting a Chandra galactic plane survey and developing
hard X-ray imaging techniques for the ultimate all-sky
survey for black holes.
Haldan Cohn
(Indiana University)
Haldan Cohn is a professor of astronomy at Indiana
University in Bloomington, where he has been since
1983. He was an undergraduate major in physics at
Harvard, where he met his wife Phyllis Lugger, and
received his Ph.D. in astrophysics from Princeton
in 1979. Following his senior year at Harvard, he
worked as a summer student in galactic X-ray astronomy,
under the guidance of Josh Grindlay. He held postdoctoral
positions at Harvard-Smithsonian, Caltech, and the
University of Illinois before joining the Indiana
University faculty. A summer astrophysics workshop
that Haldan Cohn and Phyllis Lugger attended at
the Aspen Institute for Physics in 1983 led to a
long-term collaboration with Josh Grindlay, Charles
Bailyn, and Adrienne Cool on identifying galactic
X-ray binaries, particularly in globular star clusters.
His research interests center on theoretical and
observational studies of globular clusters, with
an emphasis on the core collapse process that leads
to extraordinarily high densities at the centers
of some clusters, such as NGC 6397, producing ideal
conditions for the formation of X-ray binary stars.
Phyllis Lugger
(Indiana University)
Phyllis Lugger is a professor of astronomy at Indiana
University in Bloomington. She received her Ph.D.
in astronomy from Harvard University in 1982, was
a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University,
and an assistant professor at the University of
Missouri in Columbia, before becoming an assistant
professor at IU in 1984. She was promoted to associate
professor in 1988 and to professor in 1995. While
a student at Harvard (undergraduate and graduate),
she met Josh Grindlay, Charles Bailyn, Adrienne
Cool and Haldan Cohn. Her research interests center
on the dynamics of stellar systems (globular star
clusters, interacting binary stars, galactic nuclei
and clusters of galaxies). Phyllis Lugger and Haldan
Cohn test theoretical predictions of cluster evolution
simulations that they run on a GRAPE6 N-body supercomputer
at Indiana University, using the Hubble Space Telescope,
the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the WIYN Telescope.
Charles Bailyn
(Yale University)
Charles Bailyn is a Professor of Astronomy and
Chair of the Department of Astronomy at Yale University.
He was an undergraduate at Yale (where he was a
classmate of Adrienne Cool, the Principal Investigator
of this project) and a graduate student at Harvard
(once again a classmate of Adrienne's). After a
post-doctoral stint at Harvard's Society of Fellows,
he returned to Yale in the guise of a faculty member,
albeit one who knew far more than he ought about
what students were doing outside of the classroom.
His research interests focus on stars in groups,
from ultra-compact binary systems to large clusters
like Omega Centauri. When not doing research, teaching,
or sitting in tiresome committee meetings, he can
occasionally be found singing Renaissance madrigals,
and/or feigning injury to avoid performing too badly
at a variety of athletic endeavors.
Other Collaborators
Craig Sosin (UC Berkeley)
P. Callanan (UCC)
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