Astrophysics group goes from strength to strength
Assoc Prof Melanie Johnston-Hollitt has just been re-elected as the Board Chair of the multi-national, 60-million-dollar funded Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radiotelescope. Melanie is the first person ever to be elected for a second term as this consortium’s Chair of the Board, and she will be using her strong mandate to negotiate new funding for the instrument’s upgrade. The MWA is a precursor telescope to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). VUW joined the project in 2011, and we now have 9 staff members and 3 students across SCPS and ECS working on data from this telescope. Details of the New Zealand involvement in the SKA, and its beneficial aspect for growing local data-processing industries, was recently discussed in the NZ Herald.
Coming on top of her high-profile engagement with governance of the MWA, Melanie has also been selected as the 2015 Pickering Lecturer of the Institution of Professional Engineers in New Zealand (IPENZ). This great honour puts Melanie next to luminaries such as inventor Sir Ray Avery and JPL director Dr Charles Elachi who were the 2011 and 2014 IPENZ Pickering Lecturers, respectively. Last but not least, Melanie has very recently been elected a Fellow of the Astronomical Society of Australia. Congratulations to Melanie on these tremendous achievements!
It is also great to see that Dr Stephen Curran, who has barely finished settling into his new location, is already making strong contributions to civic engagement. See him explaining how long the sun can go on shining on Science Stuff.