Director of the MERLIN/VLBI National Facility
3 February 1999
Dr Phil Diamond has been appointed Director of the MERLIN/VLBI National Facility at the Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories at Jodrell Bank, and took up his duties on 1st February 1999.
Dr Diamond, aged 40, left
his position as Associate Director of the U.S. National Radio Astronomy
Observatory at Socorro, New Mexico, where he had responsibility for VLA and
VLBA operations and computing.
He brings to the National Facility a wealth of
VLBI and managerial expertise, at a time when closer integration is planned of
MERLIN and European VLBI operations.
Dr Diamond's scientific interests are primarily in the maser emission from the circumstellar envelopes of stars and active galactic nuclei.
The MERLIN/VLBI National Facility is operated by the University of Manchester on behalf of the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, as a high resolution radio astronomical imaging facility.
MERLIN has matched resolution to that of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and there is regular linkage of MERLIN telescopes to radio telescopes in Europe and around the world by Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) tape recording, to achieve the highest resolution of all astronomy.
For further details, visit the Jodrell Bank homepage at http://www.jb.man.ac.uk
