Director's Message
Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue16 1–31 May 2021
Congratulations to Lisa Kewley!
Lisa Kewley has been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences as an international member. This is a very high accolade that recognises Lisa’s significant scientific achievements and her major contributions to our understanding of galaxy evolution. Please join me in offering the warmest congratulations to Lisa on this wonderful recognition! She joins Ken Freeman and Brian Schmidt as RSAA’s third member of the NAS.
Farwell but not goodbye
On 22 April we farewelled Jelena Mudrinic, Naomi Hawley, Marcus Lingham and Lisa O’Farrell, thanking them for their service to RSAA and the AITC in particular. Jelena is considering further management study to advance her career, Naomi has found another job that will start after her maternity leave, Marcus will be working with EOS, and Lisa is still working for ANU - just with InSpace rather than RSAA. We say farewell to all of them, but hope it is not goodbye: Marcus and Lisa we expect to continue seeing in their new professional roles, and we hope Jelena and Naomi will keep in touch socially at least.
On 29 April we farewelled Anna Moore as AITC Director. Anna is not really going anywhere, since she remains a professor at RSAA and will continue to be working on DREAMS and her other projects at the AITC one day a week. However she is giving up her role as AITC Director to concentrate on her role as InSpace Director. Anna has done a fantastic job of standing up the AITC as a fully operational and largely self-financing instrumentation program, broadening it’s scope from astronomical instrumentation encompass key capabilities and facilities for Australia’s nascent space program. We wish Anna all the best in her InSpace role, which is going to be increasingly important to the AITC in future.
New AITC roles
With Anna’s departure, I will be taking on the role of (interim) AITC Director, Celine D’Orgeville will be AITC Deputy Director, Francois Rigaut will be AAO-Stromlo Director and Roger Haynes will remain AITC Technical Manager. The new structure of the AITC Management is shown here; more details were provided in my all-staff email of 18 April.
RSAA Strategic Initiatives
The RSAA Strategic Initiatives scheme offered $250,000 to support projects having goals that advance the mission of the School in research, education or outreach, or support the reforms of the RSAA Culture Action Plan, or increase or diversify the School’s revenue base. I’m delighted to report that there was a strong response to this opportunity, which produced 29 Strategic Initiatives proposals asking for $671,500. The proposals covered a wide range of creative ideas, covering all of the goals listed above. Several proposals requested funds to carry out initiatives linked to RSAA’s Culture Action Plan and, notably, seven proposals had a focus on activities related to Indigenous culture, education and outreach.
The RSAA Executive reviewed all 29 proposals against the goals of the Strategic Initiatives program and the guidelines, which emphasised that: (i) proposals benefitting the whole School or disadvantaged groups would be preferred; (ii) return on investment (interpreted very broadly) would be a significant factor; and (iii) high-risk, high-return proposals will not be disfavoured. Due to the large number of proposals and the large amount of requested funding, not all proposals could be supported and some of the supported proposals were not able to be fully funded. In the end, the Executive allocated the full $250,000 available to 14 of the 29 proposals, with another 2 proposals to be funded from the School’s operating budget.
The Executive would like to thank all the proposers. There will be follow-up actions to explore some of the unsuccessful proposals further and see if they might be able to obtain funding by other means.
The list of successful proposals can be found here.
Matthew Colless
