Director's Message

Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue44 1–30 September 2023

Welcome to the first Lunations of Spring.

I was delighted to hear that two DECRA 2024 applications have been successful at RSAA. Please join me in congratulating Sven Buder and Yuxiang Qin on their fellowships. Sven is well known to us, while Yuxiang will join us from the University of Melbourne where he has been working within ASTRO 3D. In further excellent news, Lilli Sun in the CGA was also successful. I was also delighted this month with the news that Melissa Ness will be re-joining RSAA in early 2024 as the second appointment from the most recently advertised continuing positions. For those who have not met Melissa, she completed her PhD at RSAA in 2013 with Ken Freeman, and is currently at Columbia University. Melissa is a world leader in Galactic archaeology, with a focus on understanding the relationship between the ages, chemical abundances and orbital properties of stars, across the Milky Way disk and bulge. 

This month we saw some changes and additions to our executive, with Luca Casagrande appointed as the Associate Director (IDEA) and Christoph Federrath as the Associate Director (HDR). I look forward to working with Christoph and Luca in these very important roles, and again acknowledge the excellent work undertaken by Helmut Jerjen this year as the interim Associate Director (HDR) and during the last 5 years as the HDR Convenor.

As reported earlier, MNRAS has taken the decision to move to read and publish agreements from October 2023 (https://academic.oup.com/mnras/pages/mnras-open-access?login=false).  I am pleased that the University has now become part of the Oxford University Press read and publish agreement, meaning that RSAA researchers can continue publishing in MNRAS as we have previously without any publication charges.

I wanted to take the opportunity to provide a reminder of the RSAA Distinguished Visitors program to support visitors for longer-term visits to work collaboratively on activities associated with RSAA’s astrophysics and technology research programs. The deadline for Semester 1 2024 Distinguished Visitors is September 15th. Please see https://rsaa.anu.edu.au/research/stromlo-distinguished-visitor-program-rsaa

There is an opportunity this month for researchers interested in hosting Future Research Talent (FRT) scholars under the FRT India and FRT Indonesia programs. If interested please nominate a research project using the EoI form previously circulated and return to it me by Wednesday, 13 September. In 2024 the College will fund up to 7 Indian FRT scholars and 2 Indonesian FRT scholars to undertake research projects within RSAA.

Finally, there is significant work on site this month, with the renovations of the Woolley building and associated disruptions with temporary office relocations. We are also in the midst of the installation of the Dome for the optical ground station facility. Thanks to everyone for work and patience with these processes.  

Stuart Wyithe