Participants:
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Carlos Allende-Prieto
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Carlos Allende-Prieto received his PhD in Astrophysics from the Univerity of La Laguna, Spain in 1998. Since
then, he has been a W.J. McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow and a Research Associate at UT. His research interests
include spectral line formation and model atmospheres and the structure and evolution of the Milky Way.
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Andrew Baker
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Andrew Baker is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching,
Germany. He is a native of Austin and a graduate of the LBJ Science Academy, Harvard College, and the California Institute
of Technology. He completed his PhD under Nick Scoville at Caltech in 2000. Since then, he has been a postdoctoral fellow
in the infrared/submillimeter group at the MPE. Andrew's work focuses on infrared and millimeter observations of galaxies
at both low and high redshift. Recent projects include detections of dust and molecular gas in z ~ 3 Lyman break galaxies,
high-resolution mapping of the circumnuclear gas dynamics in nearby active galaxies, and 2.2 micron imaging of extragalactic
fields at (almost) the diffraction limit of the ESO Very Large Telescope.
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Nairn Baliber
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Nairn Baliber, a student in the midst of his final year in the UT Astronomy Department's PhD program, under the supervision of
Bill Cochran, has spent most of his graduate career designing and conducting a program to search for transits of
close-orbiting, Jupiter-sized extrasolar planets. The TeMPEST project uses the McDonald Observatory 0.8m Prime Focus
Corrector to do photometry on thousands of stars in rich fields in the plane of the Milky Way with the aim of identifying small
drops in the light from stars caused by such close-orbiting planets. Nairn has finished collecting the majority of the data needed
for the project and is currently sifting through light curves, identifying transit candidates, and following them up with the facilities
at the McDonald Observatory and the HET.
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Joseph Barranco
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Joseph Barranco is currently finishing his PhD dissertation in Astrophysics at UC Berkeley under the direction of Phil Marcus.
Beginning later this fall, he will be an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UCSB. The second and
third years of his fellowship will be spent at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. His research involves a study of
the dynamics of vortices in protoplanetary disks and what role these vortices play in the formation of stars and planets. Vortices
are important because they trap dust grains and may therefore increase the rate of agglomeration. They also may be important
n the transfer of angular momentum. He carries out this study using a 3D hydrodynamical simulation.
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Frank Bash
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Frank N. Bash, Ph.D., has served since 1989 as director of McDonald Observatory. A native of Medford, Oregon, Bash earned his
bachelor's degree from Willamette University in Salem, Oregon; his master's degree in astronomy from Harvard University; and
his doctorate from the University of Virginia. A well-known and widely published specialist in radio astronomy, Bash joined the
faculty of the University of Texas at Austin in 1969. He served as Chairman of the University of Texas at Austin Department of
Astronomy from 1982 through 1986. In 1985, he was named the Frank N. Edmonds Regents Professor of Astronomy at UT Austin.
As a researcher, Bash is interested in large-scale star formation processes in spiral galaxies. He has won numerous awards for the
quality of his teaching, and was named to the teaching excellence Hall of Fame at UT Austin in 1984. As Director of McDonald
Observatory, Bash has led the effort for design, funding, and construction of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory
in West Texas. Bash has also led the effort to expand the public-outreach programs of McDonald Observatory. These programs
include the Observatory's Visitors Center, which hosts over 130,000 visitors per year, and StarDate radio, which reaches millions
of people each day in English, Spanish, and German. He has served as President of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and
Councilor of the American Astronomical Society.
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Norbert Christlieb
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Norbert Christlieb is currently an Assistant Professor at the Hamburger Sternwarte of the University of Hamburg, Germany.
He received his PhD from the University of Hamburg in 2000. He has been a Marie Curie Fellow at Uppsala Observatory and an
Australian NRC Fellow at Mt. Stromlo. His research is focused on searches for and studies of extremely metal-poor stars as a
means of studying the earliest phases of the formation and chemical evolution of the Galaxy. He is using the Hamburg/ESO
objective-prism survey and automatic spectral classification techniques to pursue many other current issues in stellar astrophysics.
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Christopher Conselice
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Christopher Conselice is a National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics Fellow at Caltech. He received his PhD from the University of
Wisconsin, Madison in 2001. He studies the formation of galaxies, addressing the issue of how rather than when the galaxies form. He does this by examining the detailed properties and characteristics of nearby and distant systems. By understanding the physical processes responsible for
galaxy features, and connecting nearby and high redshift galaxy populations, he is attempting to decipher the history of this formation.
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