Director's Message
Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue27 1–30 April 2022
The recent past and near future are filled with recruitment activities. We have had/will have visits to Stromlo by candidates for faculty appointments, and I hope you will give them all a warm welcome and share your time generously with them in order to take their measure and allow them to take ours. Note that we will have candidates visiting both next week and the week after Anzac Day, so please sign up to meet them and have some stimulating conversations!
We have now concluded the search for a new School Manager and a formal offer has been made. I will be able to announce the outcome as soon as that offer has been accepted. I anticipate that we should have the new person active in the role by the end of this month (which will certainly be a relief to me and probably to you too!).
I hope many of you are busily writing grant applications. The ARC's Discovery Projects and Large Equipment, Infrastructure and Facilities programs have upcoming deadlines, as does the ANU’s internal Major Equipment Committee program. Although there are increasing challenges in winning grants, especially for fundamental science, such funding is a vital part of our economy and a key measure of our success as a Research School. The stochasticity of the grants process means that the quantity of proposals is nearly as important as quality, so please do submit as many proposals as possible for these programs!
Significant achievements in the past few weeks by RSAA staff and students deserve wide recognition:
- Jamie Gilbert has won Researcher of the Year and ANU InSpace Research Organisation of the Year at the Australian Space Awards for 2022; this is a wonderful acknowledgement of the major contributions that RSAA and InSpace are making to the national space program.
- Piyush Sharda has been selected as one of the participants in the 71st Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting this year.
- Jo Ciuca has been awarded a Joint Jubilee Fellowship by the School of Computer Science, with support from RSAA.
Please join with me in offering congratulations to all these people!
Now we are past the autumnal equinox and the nights are getting longer, we hope to once again begin holding public nights at Mount Stromlo. We also expect to be restarting our Winter School program. It will be good to have the general public and more students visiting Stromlo again, but of course all such events remain subject to developments in the pandemic and to the resulting restrictions on activities imposed by governments and the ANU. Nonetheless, we are clearly feeling our way back towards the full array of activities that RSAA supported before the pandemic and that’s a very welcome development, however gradual it may seem!
Matthew Colless
