Adrienne Cool
(San Francisco State University)
Adrienne Cool is a native of New York City, and
received her undergraduate degree in physics at
Yale University. She spent several 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. Adrienne bought
a pair of binoculars, learned the constellations
from her rooftop in Brooklyn, and went off to a
Ph.D. 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.
Jay Anderson
(STScI)
Jay Anderson received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley
in 1997 studying mass segregation in globular clusters.
Since finishing his degree, he has been focusing
on ways to measure accurate positions for stars
in Hubble images. The resolving power and stability
of HST provide an unprecedented opportunity for
differential astrometry in crowded fields, such
as globular clusters. Many long-anticipated projects
are now possible. These projects include: measuring
the bulk motions of satellite galaxies, measuring
the plane-of-the-sky rotations of clusters, measuring
fundamental distances to clusters by comparing plane-of-the-sky
motions with line-of-sight motions, and doing detailed
studies of how stars move within clusters.
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 and a graduate student
at Harvard. 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.
Jeff Carlin
(San Francisco State University)
Jeff Carlin is an undergraduate senior studying Astrophysics, with a Mathematics minor, at San Francisco State University. He was originally a Fine Arts major at the University of Kansas, but this didn't satisfy his curious nature, so after moving to San Francisco, he changed majors to Astrophysics. Starting in early 2001, Jeff began research on the Hubble Space Telescope images that were used to create the Hubble Heritage image of Omega Centauri, attempting to identify optical counterparts for the X-ray sources found by Daryl Haggard and Adrienne Cool in this cluster. Jeff also plans to participate in an observing run to Kitt Peak, Arizona later this fall to do follow-up observations of an optical counterpart of a field binary star system located via X-ray data. Jeff has enjoyed his research experience thus far, and looks forward to continuing research in a Ph.D. program beginning in the Fall 2002 semester. Jeff's hobbies include playing guitar and drums and attending as many Giants and A's baseball games as possible.
Peter Edmonds
(Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
Peter Edmonds grew up in the town of Albury, in the Australian countryside. He studied science at the University of Sydney as an undergraduate, followed by a Ph.D., also at the University of Sydney, where he studied pulsating stars using the Anglo-Australian Telescope. After losing too many battles with clouds he was keen to change over to space-based observing. He moved to Baltimore, Maryland for a postdoc at the Space Telescope Science Insitute, where he developed an interest in binary stars, globular clusters and Hubble Space Telescope observations, followed by a postdoc at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Currently he is working in the Education and Public Outreach group at CfA advertising the wonderful science done with the Chandra X-ray Observatory. His main research interests continue to be binaries and globular clusters, with an emphasis on HST and Chandra observations.
Jonathan Grindlay
(Harvard University) Jonathan Grindlay is the Paine Professor of Astronomy at Harvard and current Chair of the Harvard Department of Astronomy. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1971, was a Harvard Junior Fellow through 1974, then a research scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory before joining the Harvard faculty as Assistant Professor in 1976. He was promoted to Professor in 1981, and Paine Professor in 2001. His primary research interests are in high energy astrophysics and the study of compact objects (white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes) in x-ray binaries. A particularly long-standing interest and activity is the study of compact binaries in globular clusters, from the early days of x-ray astronomy through present observations with HST and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. He is fortunate to have supervised the thesis research of a number of students in this work, including Professors Cool and Bailyn.
Daryl Haggard
(University of Washington)
Daryl Haggard is a first year graduate student
in physics at San Francisco State University. She
received her undergraduate degree in Classics at
St. John's College in Santa Fe, N.M. Daryl's research
at SFSU involves looking at the giant star cluster
Omega Centauri using NASA's newest orbiting X-ray
observatory, Chandra. With Chandra's high resolution
at X-ray wavelengths she pinpoints possible binary
stars, including cataclysmic variables that are
predicted to form in the cluster. With accurate
X-ray positions in hand, her collaborators at SFSU
and at Yale are using these Hubble Space Telescope
data as well as ground-based images to identify
the stars that are emitting the X-rays. The goal
is to classify the binaries, thereby helping to
constrain current theories of stellar interactions
in globular clusters. As a NSF GK-12 fellow, Daryl
also spends part of her time working on inquiry-based
science with middle school students in San Francisco.
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