National Aeronautics and Space Administration

This list updates the one published in the past issues of Legacy. It includes new members of the science and science support teams, and members of the technical and programming staff.

Scientific Staff

In September 1993 he joined Dr. Don Lamb's group, as a research associate at The University of Chicago, to study statistical properties of gamma-ray bursts detected by BATSE/CGRO. After two years of "battle" on the controversial field of burst distributions and possible repetitions (and the related GRB distance-scale problem) he went on to study the spectral properties of bursts at MeV energies, as a member of the COMPTEL/CTRO instrument team at the Space Science Department of ESA, in Noordwijk (Netherlands), where he held an ESA Research Fellowship from October 1995 to September 1997.

At the HEASARC (since September 1997), Francois has been working on the archiving of data from the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and the BeppoSAX satellite, and preparing/maintaining the HEASARC Web-page on Gamma-Ray Bursts.

Technical Staff

Michael Arida received his B.S. in Physics in 1991 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute [RPI] in Troy, New York. While still an undergraduate, he worked for GTE Sylvania in Towanda, Pennsylvania, conducting research into electroluminescent devices. He later worked for Grumman Aerospace in Princeton, New Jersey, assisting in the design of medium energy particle accelerators. Pursuing a desire to see the world, Mike joined the U.S. Peace Corps for a two year stint teaching high school Chemistry and Physics in the small central African country of Malawi, home to the ninth largest freshwater lake in the world. He followed this with a 10 month English lecturer position at Academia Istropolitana in Brastislava, Slovak Republic.

Perhaps finally settling down, Mike joined HSTX in August, 1995 working for the HEASARC, as a member of the ROSAT Guest Observer Facility. Among his primary responsibilities for the HEASARC include maintaining the ROSAT anonymous ftp area the ASCA WWW area, as well as assisting in the processing of the ROSAT Results Archive (RRA).

Mike is also in charge of booking the ROSAT Guest Observer Facility, and the ASCA Guest Observer Facility

Lorraine Breedon graduated in 1983 from Leicester University (UK) with a BSc (Hons) in Combined Science (Physics major). By 1989 she had completed a Ph.D. on Low Mass X-ray Binaries (in the X-ray Group at Leicester) via the analysis and interpretation of EXOSAT data, and had also been employed as a FORTRAN programmer for the ROSAT and XMM projects.

Between Mar 1989 and July 1990 she joined the X-Ray Astronomy Group at ISAS in Japan under a JSPS research fellowship. Her research interests were LMXRBs, in particular the hard source GX 5-1. In addition to this research program she was GINGA duty scientist on a rota basis (this involved preparing a complete command plan for the observing day i.e. slew, manoeuvres and satellite control, taking into account the changing satellite environment and other constraints).

From Feb 1991 Lorraine worked in an entirely different area of research. Whilst in the Life Sciences Dept at Nottingham University (UK) she performed electrophysiological research: namely a study of the interaction of arthropod toxins with nicotinic acetylcholine receptors and an investigation into the effects of polyamines on the structure of artificial lipid bi-layers.

Lorraine joined the HEASARC in Sept 1995 as a programmer/analysis, and is currently working on the Calibration Database and the development of FTOOLS.

Carol Rosen has worked as a software engineer for Raytheon STX (formerly Hughes STX) for the past eight years. She earned a B.S. in Chemistry at the University of Maryland in 1978, earned her M.S. in Technical Management at Johns Hopkins University in 1985, and has acquired twenty graduate credits towards a computer science degree at Johns Hopkins University.

Jane Russell joined the HEASARC in June 1997 as software manager for the programmers from Raytheon STX (formerly Hughes STX). Her PhD thesis was in astrometry and she has experience in both optical and radio.

Saima Zobair received a B.S. in Computer Science from Utah State University in 1994 and an M.S. in Computer Science from Marguette University in 1996. She worked as a graduate assistant during her masters and wrote several web database applications using CGI programming in Perl and Java. Since her graduation, Saima has been working as a software developer for the HEASARC. She is the lead programmer for two significant web software at the HEASARC, W3Browse and Argus. Both these software packages provide web access to the HEASARC database. She also works on various other database activities.

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