Jayanne English
Heritage Postdoc: 1998 - 2000
Jayanne English has an unusual post-doctoral fellowship
at the Space
Telescope Science Institute (STScI). In addition
to doing research, she coordinates the Hubble Heritage
project and authors the Hubble
Heritage website. Jayanne also contributes to
the creation of Hubble Heritage color pictures of
astronomical objects, sometimes taking on the role
of main imagemaker (e.g., for the image of a Hickson
Compact Group 87). She is to blame for the existence
of the collage pages, beginning with the
the Bubble Nebula links page, except for the
four that Lisa Frattare was inspired to created
for Heritage's 1st Anniversary.
Like many families in Toronto, Canada, Jayanne's
traveled on weekends up to cottage country, where
they had a mesmerizing view of the sky. Perhaps
this is why Jayanne cannot remember a time when
she was not fascinated by astronomy. Before her
graduation from the Ontario
College of Art, she had already begun the B.Sc.
program in astronomy at the University
of Toronto, where, as befitting an artist, she
is remembered as colourful. Her Ph.D. adventure
was under the starry skies "down under" at Mount
Stromlo & Siding Spring Observatories in Australia,
under the supervision of Ken Freeman. After her
Ph.D. was granted in 1994 from the Australian
National University, she enjoyed the Canadian
snows and two enriching post-doctoral fellowships,
with
Judith Irwin, at
Queen's University. She has been promoting the
Canadian
Galactic Plane Survey (CGPS/RCPG) to her astronomy
colleagues in Baltimore, where STScI resides, since
her arrival at STScI at the end of August 1998.
Jayanne's research interests include the behaviour
of gas in interacting galaxies and the exchanges
of mass and energy between a galaxy's disk and its
halo. At the moment she is particularly obsessed
with the CGPS/RCPG Dominion
Radio Astrophysical Observatory data showing
a mushroom-shaped cloud bursting more than 1000
light-years out of the plane of the Milky Way. As
well as leading a team of researchers studying this
cloud, she's made images of it and other gas features
in the plane of our Milky Way galaxy.
The opportunities for producing astronomical images
from HST and CGPS datasets in the last two years
have distracted Jayanne from curating art shows
and exhibiting her other artworks. However her cooking
is still artistically delicious and adventurous.
Another interest is bicycling, which she uses to
try to minimize the effects of her cooking.
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