A rather bad photo of me.
A rather bad photo of me.
I am currently employed as a lecturer in physics and radio astronomy at the University of Tasmania . My major areas of research are in the formation of massive stars, in particular through the study of methanol masers and in AGN (active galactic nuclei) through the study of water megamasers. Further information related to some of the aspects of my astronomical work are listed below :
I teach a number of undergraduate courses, particularly in electromagnetism and special relativity and am responsible for the laboratory courses in first and third years. I am the unit coordinator for Physics 1B (KYA102), Physics 2A (KYA201) and Engineering Physics (Physics 275)
Between 1995 and 1998 my astronomy took something of a backseat as I spent the majority of my time working on the computing upgrade to the Mt Pleasant observatory. The previous computing system of PDP-11's and Vaxen, most of which dated from the 70's or earlier have been replaced by a number of PCs running the pSOS real-time operating system with overall control and coordination provided by a Unix (Sun) workstation. If you would like more details on the software upgrade they are contained here.
In 1996 Telstra donated one of its former satellite tracking antennas at the Ceduna earth station to the University. I was responsible for adapting the computing system developed for Mt Pleasant to the Ceduna observatory, thankfully the design methodology of the software system made this relatively painless.
In 1997 I made an application to the Queen's Trust for the money to purchase a laptop to assist with my astronomical research. The Queen's trust provides funding to individuals to further their development in their chosen fields. My application was successful and enabled me to purchase an Acernote light multimedia laptop PC. Further details of this research project can be found here. For both practical and personal choice reasons I run Linux on this machine. If you want some more information on the quirks of running Linux on this particular machine they can be found here.