Instrumentation fellowship. In what may be a first, a new fellowship at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is designed to support graduate work in astronomical instrument building.
In 1996, Sally Bachman Allen, reacting to an article in her local paper, sent a small sum to UCSC toward repairing the dome of the oldest telescope at Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton, some 30 kilometers east of San Jose. With her contribution, she included a note saying that her grandfather, Henry Bachmann, had been an instrument maker for the observatory in the early 20th century.
Enter university development officers. They did their homework, turning up, among other relics, a spectrograph built by Bachmann, photos, and even people who knew him or Allen's father, who grew up on the mountain. It wasn't hard to persuade Allen and her banker husband, C. Donald Allen Jr, to endow a chair for astronomical instrumentation. The Allens' $350 000 gift includes an annual graduate fellowship. "I wanted to do something that would honor both my father and my grandfather, and hopefully attract graduate students who have talent but not necessarily funding," says Allen.
Lick director Joseph Miller is the first Bachmann Professor, and the first recipient of the chair's accompanying stipend is his student Andrew Sheinis, who has designed and built instruments for the Keck telescopes.
Astronomy award founded. Virginia Trimble is donating $100 000 to fulfill a wish of the American Astronomical Society. The gift will establish the Joseph Weber Award for Astronomical Instrumentation, named in honor of Trimble's late husband, who was perhaps best known for his pioneering work on detectors for gravitational radiation. "Both astronomy and physics tend not to recognize very well the absolutely essential people who can build things and make them work. . . . [Weber] unquestionably belonged to that small fraternity," says Trimble, an astronomer who splits her time between the University of California at Irvine and the University of Maryland, College Park. "Often the people who have used instruments to do the science get the recognition, and those who have built the hardware get overlooked," adds AAS executive officer Robert Milkey. "The recognition of those who have propelled astronomical observation through the development of innovative instrumentation is the goal of this award." The AAS has not yet determined the cash value of the annual award, for which the first winner will be announced next year.
New DTRA Director. Physicist Stephen Younger has left his position as senior associate laboratory director for national security at Los Alamos National Laboratory to become the new director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. DTRA is the agency charged with reducing the threat to the US from nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction. Younger was appointed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in early August and took over the leadership of DTRA on 1 September.
Younger, who holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Maryland, College Park, has spent most of his career working with various aspects of nuclear weapons design. After a stint at the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST), where he worked in atomic physics, he joined the nuclear design department of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1982. While there, he led design groups for the nuclear-driven x-ray laser and other nuclear explosive concepts.
Younger moved to Los Alamos in 1989 and led programs in inertial confinement fusion, and "was responsible for the largest operational unit at the laboratory, the nuclear weapons directorate, during a period of significant change and enormous challenge," said lab director John Browne. Younger told his Los Alamos colleagues that he was "looking forward to the challenge of leading the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. This move continues a career commitment to reducing the dangers to the United States and our allies from weapons of mass destruction."
NSF TeraGrid. Four groups will share $53 million over three years from NSF to develop the TeraGrid, a distributed supercomputer network capable of performing 11.6 trillion calculations per second (11.6 teraflops) and transferring 40 billion data bits per second.
"This will be the largest, most comprehensive information infrastructure ever deployed for open scientific research," says Dan Reed, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign and one of the TeraGrid's principal investigators. "Unprecedented amounts of data are being generated . . . and groups of scientists are conducting new simulations of increasingly complex phenomena."
The TeraGrid will be a user facility, available competitively to US scientists. All data- and computation-intensive research will be game, with foreseen applications in, among other areas, genomics, particle physics, astrophysics, and storm, climate, and earthquake prediction. The TeraGrid is slated to start up next year.
NCSA's TeraGrid partners are the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California at San Diego, Argonne National Laboratory, and Caltech. NSF may expand the TeraGrid to include the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center--which is expected to reach its peak performance of 6 teraflops this fall--and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
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