Director's Message
Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue42 1–31 July 2023
Welcome to Lunations in July. It’s been a busy month.
Last week I was at the ASA Annual Science Meeting in Sydney where, Sven Buder was honoured as joint winner of the Louise Webster Prize for outstanding research by a scientist early in their post-doctoral career. Sven’s winning research is based on the paper Buder et al. (2021) ‘The GALAH+ survey: third data release’. Piyush Sharda also received the Charlene Heisler Prize for his PhD thesis “The role of metals from molecular clouds to galactic discs”. With both Louise Webster and Charlene Heisler being famous RSAA alumni it was particularly enjoyable to see Sven and Piyush receive their prizes and present their work in brilliant presentations at the ASA ASM last week. In addition to Sven and Piyush RSAA researchers and students presented 15 very high-quality talks and posters, showcasing the diverse and excellent science being done. Congratulations to all presenters. Also at the ASA AGM, I was very pleased to see that Christoph Federrath was elected to the new ASA Council.
This month we received outcomes from the Pleiades Awards and I was delighted that RSAA was successful in receiving a Silver Award. The Silver Pleiades Award recognises a sustained record of at least two years monitoring and improving the working environment. It also recognises leadership in promoting positive actions as examples of best practice to other organisations in the astronomy community. The committee noted commendable efforts demonstrated by RSAA over the past two years that deserve recognition, and acknowledged RSAA’s ongoing commitment to promoting equity and inclusion. My thanks to Noelia Martinez Rey and Luca Casagrande who led the development of this application as well as all members of the IDEA committee and RSAA community who have worked on our initiatives promoting equity and diversity.
Funding was also recently announced for 10 projects under the Demonstrator Program of the Moon to Mars initiative. Among the successful projects was the “Australian Deep Space Optical Ground Station Network”, led out of the AITC by Francis Bennet, Michael Copeland, Doris Grosse, Noelia Martinez Rey, Tony Travouillon, which was funded at $4.5 Million. The program will establish the first Australian deep space communication-capable optical ground station by upgrading the ANU optical ground station (OGS) to be compatible with NASA’s Optical to Orion (O2O) mission. Congratulations Francis and team!
In June I attended my first VC Dialog. These sessions are an opportunity for Schools and the College to update on progress towards achievement of the 2023 College/Portfolio, and to collect input and feedback for the finalisation of a draft 2024 Plan. The Dean presented a summary of the dialog at the recent College Forum.
At the recent All School Meeting I presented results from the ANYou survey, together with our proposed focus areas and action. For those who were unable to attend the All School Meeting and are interested to see these, my presentation is available on the intranet under the Director’s report.
Stuart Wyithe
