Illinois researcher gives invited talk at SKA conference in South Africa
Athol Kemball, a University of Illinois researcher with appointments in the Department of Astronomy and the Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies (IACAT), recently was invited to speak at the annual graduate student conference of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), an international project to design and build a next-generation radio telescope. Kemball, who leads calibration and processing research within the U.S. Technology Development Project (TDP) for the SKA, discussed “Petascale Astronomy and the SKA.”
(The U.S. Technology Development Program for the Square Kilometer Array is led by Jim Cordes of Cornell University, who recently was interviewed about the SKA for NCSA’s Access magazine.)
The conference was organized under a human capacity development program: “Youth into Science and Engineering,” which provides science and engineering graduate support to 80-90 PhD and master’s students working on SKA-related research. The meeting was held Dec. 1-5, 2008, at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study near Cape Town, South Africa. A South African site is one of two still being considered as the location of the SKA; the other potential site is in Western Australia.
The Youth into Science and Engineering program is a leading-edge education and outreach initiative, designed to build an engineering and science community for the SKA in South Africa, to attract students to science and engineering through astronomy, and to broaden and diversify both the astrophysics and engineering communities. Kemball has co-advised students under this program for several years.
The meeting was attended by three invited speakers, from Europe, Canada, and the United States, by regional invited scientists from Mauritius and Madagascar, local scientists and engineers, and the graduate students supported under the program. The students gave talks on their graduate research, while plenary talks were scheduled on topics relevant to the SKA. The conference was opened by the South African Minister for Science and Technology, M. Mangena; the science and technology Director-General, P. Mjwara; and the South African SKA project director, B. Fanaroff.