Team Members (original) (raw)

More Coming Soon!

The current list of team members as borrowed from the official ALFALFA website. (Apologies for any mistakes in copying this information.) See incorrect information? Missing information? Are you a team member and would like a bio/picture included? Are you involved with the Undergraduate ALFALFA Team and would like to be included? Then contact Betsey with the relevant details.

Cornell University: Home of EGG – The ExtraGalactic Group

Martha Haynes grew up outside Boston Mass, the youngest of the Haynes gang; she spent her childhood trying to keep up with her siblings, throwing baseballs, and learning office worker skills (of some relevance to a survey like ALFALFA as it turns out) at the family business. She attended Wellesley College where she majored in astronomy and physics, learned to row, and served in numerous House Council positions. During a fateful summer after graduation, she was a summer student at the Arecibo Observatory where she got hooked on radio astronomy, rice and beans, and the awesome sensitivity of the Arecibo telescope. She entered graduate school at Indiana University in Bloomington and finished her PhD as a graduate student in residence at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. (If you read about RG, below, you will notice some similarities). After receiving her PhD, she took up a postdoc at Arecibo and then became a staff member there, but was lured back to NRAO in 1981 when she became the site director in Green Bank. Two years later, she began her faculty career at Cornell where she has been ever since except for occasional jaunts to visit other institutions. She also served for 18 months as Interim President of Associated Universities Inc, the not-for-profit corporation which manages the NRAO when she learned that commuting from Ithaca to DC is not a lot of fun. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She serves on lots of (too many?) committees and is currently a Vice President of the International Astronomical Union. She received (with RG) the Henry Draper Medal of the NAS in 1989. At Cornell, she was DUS in astronomy for 12 years, served as coach of the undergraduate rowing club for 6 years and is currently a faculty fellow at the awesome Carl Becker House.

Riccardo Giovanelli was born on a hot August morning the 30th of August 1946 in Praticello, commune di Gattatico, provincia di Reggio Emilia, the flatlands of northern Italy. He spent most of his childhood in Argentina, playing soccer, eating steak and watching movies. Like Copernicus, he studied at the University of Bologna, receiving his Laurea (summa cum laude) in physics in 1968. He then moved to Bloomington Indiana, where he received his Ph.D. degree in Astronomy from Indiana University in 1976, based on work he carried out as a junior research associate at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. During 1973-4, he was a “civil volunteer” teaching physics at the National University of El Salvador in substitution of his Italian military service. After a brief return to the research staff in Bologna, he became the Karcher Visiting Lecturer at the University of Oklahoma in 1977. In 1978, he joined the scientific staff of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center in Arecibo, Puerto Rico where he later became Head of the Radio Astronomy Group in 1985 and Arecibo Observatory Director in 1987. In 1991 he joined the faculty of Cornell University as a full professor. In 1989 he was awarded the Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences for his research in Observational Cosmology. In 1992, the President of Italy bestowed upon him the honorific title of Cavaliere dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana, and in 2011, he received the Bandiera Tricolore from his home province of Reggio Emilia. He is currently the principal investigator of the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA (ALFALFA) Survey and Director of the Cornell-Caltech Atacama Telescope (C-CAT) project.

Betsey is a second year graduate student at Cornell and is one of the many chickens in the coop of the EGG factory. She has blogged on and off for several years as a means to keep in touch with far flung friends and has decided to put her meager set of internet skills to use sharing the science she’s working on. Betsey loves understanding galaxies – especially the weird ones. She also climbs (rock and ice) and trains martial arts when she’s allowed out of the office.

Sabrina is a former EGG grad student, and now she works at Caltech as a postdoc. In her current project, she’s investigating the overlap between the hydrogen-rich galaxies found in ALFALFA, and those found in surveys that look in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum. She wakes up every morning to the soft snoring of her two bulldogs and ready to discover galaxies, especially the dwarf ones. She likes organic food, tattoos, and Joel McHale, but dislikes giant squid.

Ann is a fifth year grad student in the EGG group, studying the distribution of galaxies found in ALFALFA. Since ALFALFA galaxies all contain neutral hydrogen, it’s an interesting question to ask just how much they contain, and how many galaxies there are of each mass. Hopefully, this will help us learn about the relationship between hydrogen in galaxies and star formation, and how that relationship might change as the Universe evolves. When she’s not at work, Ann spends a lot of time working on public outreach, watching Lost, and hunting down gluten-free treats.

Greg Hallenbeck

Shan Huang

Manolis Papastergis

ATNF:
Erik Muller

Arcetri:
Edvige Corbelli
Carlo Giovanardi
Marco Grossi
Leslie Hunt
Sperello di Serego Alighieri

Caltech:
Judd Bowman

Cardiff:
Jonathan Davies

Colgate University:
Tom Balonek

Cordoba:
Diego Garcia Lambas
Carlos Valotto

GSFC:
Susan Neff

Georgia Southern University:
Jim Higdon
Sarah Higdon

Harvard-Smithsonian CfA:
Karen Masters
Jessica Rosenberg

Humboldt State University:
David Kornreich

INAF/Brera:
Ginevra Trinchieri

Indiana University:
Jayce Dowell
Liese van Zee

Kiev:
Valentina Karachentsev

Lafayette College:
Lyle Hoffman

MPIA-Garching:
Barbara Catinella

Macalester College:
John Cannon

Marseilles:
Alessandro Boselli

Meudon:
Wim van Driel

Milano-Bicocca:
Giuseppe Gavazzi

Milano-Brera:
Angela Iovino
Christian Marinoni

Milano-CNR:
Marco Scodeggio

NAIC-Arecibo:
Mikael Lerner
Emmanuel Momjian
Robert Minchin
Phil Perillat

NCRA/Tata Institute:
Ayesha Begum
Jayaram Chengalur

NRAO:
Eduardo Hardy
Brian Kent

NRAO Jansky/Rutgers:
Kristine Spekkens

NYU:
Mike Blanton

Naval Research Laboratory:
Christopher Springob

OCIW:
Jeremy Darling

Roma-Monte Porzio:
Sabina Sabatini
Roberto Scaramella

SAO:
Igor Karachentsev

Siena:
Rose Finn

Skidmore:
Mary Crone Odekon

St. Lawrence University:
Jeff Miller
Aileen O’Donoghue

St. Mary’s College of California:
Ron Olowin

Tel Aviv University:
Oded Spector

Trieste:
Paolo Salucci

Union College:
Rebecca Koopmann

U. Barcelona:
Jose Solanes
Mari Carmen Toribio

UC Berkeley:
Andrew West

U. Crete:
Vassilis Charmandaris

University of Michigan:
Mary Putman

Univeristy of Minnesota:
Shea Brown
Evan Skillman

U. Puerto Rico:
Carmen Pantoja

University of Washington:
Fabio Governato
Miguel Morales

University of Wisconsin:
Kelley Hess
Eric Wilcots

University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point:
Katie Jore

U. Zurich:
Amelie Saintonge

Wesleyan University:
John Salzer

West Texas A&M:
David Craig
Paul Fisher

Wise Observatory:
Noah Brosch

Yale:
Marla Geha