AITC News
Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue37 1–28 February 2023
Happy New Year from the entire AITC team!
Our team is growing fast with 10 new positions being advertised in the last 6 months of 2022 and a further 10 or so to be announced in the coming weeks. This month we have already had the pleasure to welcome 6 new faces to the AITC: Grace McGinness, Lu Wang, Monique Cockram, Varvara Efremova, Mark Blundell, and Mark Downing. Grace and Lu have recently joined the AITC Mechanical Engineering group; Monique’s Masters project last year enticed her to come back this year as a Research Officer; Varvara has been a member of the ANU ACCESS-NRI team and is joining our Software group; Mark B. joins us as a Sr Project Manager following many years of fruitful collaborations with RSAA when he worked at EOS Space Systems; and Mark D. is lending his extensive expertise with ESO detectors to support the AITC detector development program.
As you can imagine I am pretty excited to see the 2022 AITC women-only recruitment starting to deliver on our bold objective to bring gender diversity to the 30% W:M ratio mark at the AITC. The amount of effort that this initiative has required to date from the AITC Management and Discipline Leads, with contributions from the entire AITC staff and heroic support by the College of Science HR cannot be understated! I would like to acknowledge in particular the incredibly enthusiastic and efficient contributions of our Technical Director Roger Haynes and HR recruitment lead Sarah Leung. They and many others at RSAA and the broader ANU are truly gender equity champions!
Our work in that space is not over and we expect further diverse staff (scientists, engineers and other professional staff) to be joining us over the next few months. With them the AITC staff is expected to grow from ~40 people (~30 FTE) in late 2022 to about 57 people (~45 FTE) by the end of 2023. So don’t hesitate to walk into the AITC building and introduce yourselves to anyone you may not know yet. RSAA is a very friendly and inspiring community offering daily opportunities to learn from each other, staff and students alike. We should all take advantage of it!
2023 is shaping up to be another exciting and successful year for the AITC. 18 January 2023 marked the 20th anniversary of the firestorm which devastated Mount Stromlo and destroyed the observatory’s telescopes, laboratories and workshops. It is remarkable that this year the AITC will achieve the vision of those who 20 years ago chose to take advantage of this catastrophic event to embrace not only astronomy but also space science and instrumentation research and technology development: in 2023 the AITC space capabilities development and support program will for the first time reach parity with our well-established astronomical capabilities and support program in terms of research funding and resources to support it. While we will continue to support our national and international astronomy collaborators at Siding Spring, the European Southern Observatory, and the Giant Magellan Telescope to name a few, we will also benefit from ANU InSpace’s nation-leading engagement with the Australian space industry to “iLaunch” our Earth Observation, Detector, Laser Communications and Space Testing programs.
The AITC like the rest of the world is coming out of an incredibly difficult 2-3 years which the Centre has weathered brilliantly thanks to the incredible resourcefulness and resilience of its most important assets: our staff and students. While 2021 saw the restructuring and consolidation of our research programs into 7 astronomy and 4 space programs, and in 2022 we worked to fine-tune the unique AITC business model and strengthen our operational capabilities, 2023 will focus on the well-being and satisfaction of all AITC team members. The arrival of new staff will help to lessen the disproportionately high demand that has been weighing heavily on everyone’s shoulders and their mental health over the past few years; a more diverse workforce will bring renewed creativity and innovation to our research and development activities; and we will focus our efforts to ensure that all team members have equitable access to training and career development activities, starting with a new professional staff career structure to be launched in March of this year. All these efforts and more will be firmly supported by the excellent financial position that the AITC finds itself in as we begin the new year.
On this optimistic and forward-looking note, we wish everyone at the RSAA an exciting, fun and rewarding new year!
Celine & the AITC team
Picture: This photo was taken in early 2022 while only a subset of the AITC team had returned to work on site at Mount Stromlo. A new picture will be arranged later this year to capture more of the current AITC staff and include all the new people who will be joining our great team in 2023.
