News & Events

"The Quest for Perfect Timing", UWA News article featuring Professor Mike Tobar from the Frequency Standards & Metrology Group. See p. 2 for details. (4/12/06)

Congratulations Professor Mike Tobar on being elevated to IEEE Fellow. (23/11/06)

Congratulations Professor Mike Tobar on being awarded the 2006 Walter Boas Medal for excellence in research in Physics. (23/11/06)

Welcome to Professor Lister Staveley-Smith, Premier's Fellow in Astronomy (1/11/06)

Welcome to Professor Peter Quinn, Premier's Fellow in Astronomy (17/10/06)

"Flying Telescope". Dr Jackie Davidson discusses SOFIA, a joint project of NASA and the German Space Agency (9/10/06)

"Supersymmetry Down Under", Science Matters, Vol. 1 Issue 3. Spring 2006

Welcome to Professor Lister Staveley-Smith, Premier's Fellow in Astronomy

Professor Lister Staveley-Smith joins the School of Physics at UWA as a Premier's Fellow in Radio Astronomy. Professor Staveley-Smith was born in Edinburgh, and was educated at the Universities of Cambridge and Manchester. He received his Ph.D on the non-Hubble velocities of spiral galaxies from the University of Manchester (Jodrell Bank) in 1985, after which he was a postdoc at Jodrell Bank, moving to Sydney in 1987 to take up the award of a SERC/PPARC Bicentennial Fellowship at the Anglo-Australian Observatory.

Since 1989, Professor Staveley-Smith has worked at the Australia Telescope National Facility (CSIRO) in Sydney, firstly as an ARC postdoc, and then as a staff scientist. He was responsible for the first radio imaging of the remnant of SN1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), the nearest and brightest supernova for 400 years. He also led teams which investigated the large-scale structure of hydrogen in the LMC and its companion, the SMC, in unprecedented detail using the newly developed Australia Telescope Compact Array. As project scientist for the 20cm Parkes multibeam receiver, which successfully performed the HI All-Sky Survey (HIPASS) from 1997 to 2002, Professor Staveley-Smith was awarded the CSIRO medal in 1998. From 2000, he was Head of Astrophysics and Graduate Student Convener, and from 2005 was Assistant Director (Astrophysics). Professor Staveley-Smith was also the Director of the Gemini and SKA Major National Research Facility from 2004.

Professor Staveley-Smith joins UWA with the intention of helping build radio astronomy in WA, ensuring maximum participation in the international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and the world-class precursor telescopes, the CSIRO-led extended New Technology Demonstrator (xNTD) and the MIT-led Low Frequency Demonstrator (LFD). The xNTD and LFD are both scheduled to begin operating in WA in 2 to 3 years time.

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Welcome to Professor Peter Quinn, Premier's Fellow in Astronomy

Prof. Peter Quinn was born in Australia and received his BSc(Hons) in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Wollongong in 1978 where he received the University Medal in Physics. He conducted graduate studies in astronomy and astrophysics at the Australian National University and received his PhD in 1982 with a thesis dissertation on dynamics of disk galaxy mergers. His discovery of the structure and dynamics of galactic shells was highlighted in the Making of the Australian National University 1946-1996 as a major contribution to international astronomical research.

During postdoctoral appointments in Theoretical Astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology (1982-1985) and the Space Telescope Science Institute (1985-1989) Prof. Quinn pursued his research interests in galaxy formation and dynamics, cosmology and dark matter using supercomputing facilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Centre. This work discovered the Quinn-Goodman effect for angular momentum dependent galactic accretion.

In 1989, Prof. Quinn took up a Research Fellowship in the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at ANU to lead the Australian involvement in the MACHO Dark Matter Search Project. The MACHO project took the front cover of Nature with the first microlensing evidence of baryonic dark matter in 1991. His work on computational astrophysics was awarded a Gordon Bell computing performance award in 1993 and a NASA High Performance Computing and Communications Grand Challenge Award in 1992.

In 1995, Prof. Quinn accepted a position as Division Head of the newly formed Data Management and Operations Division at the European Southern Observatory headquarters in Munich. While at ESO, Prof. Quinn lead the efforts to design, implement and operate an end-to-end science data flow system for the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT), the world’s largest optical and infrared observatory. This work was awarded a Computerworld 21st Century Achievement Award for Science in June 2005. During his time at ESO, Prof. Quinn directed the FP-5 Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (AVO) project, helped lay the foundations for the International Virtual Observatory Alliance and coordinated the formation of the EURO-VO as a program to realize VO-enable science for Europe.

In December 2005, Prof. Quinn was awarded a Western Australian Premier’s Fellowship and will took up the position of Professor of Astronomy at the University of Western Australia in August 2006.

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