First Australian SKA Regional Centre Director appointed

CSIRO astronomer Dr Karen Lee-Waddell has been appointed as the first Director of the Australian SKA Regional Centre (AusSRC).

In her new role, Karen will lead the Australian effort to design and build computing and data intensive research capability that will support astronomers using the Australian SKA precursor telescopes ASKAP and the MWA and eventually the SKA.

Karen has been working as part of the ASKAP team for the past five years, helping to develop and enhance the telescope and its processing software. She is also currently the Project Scientist for the WALLABY survey science team, coordinating a collaboration of 150 international researchers and playing an instrumental role in producing new science results.

Karen is taking up her new position on the 21st of September, based in Perth at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) and CSIRO.

The AusSRC will be part of an international network of SKA Regional Centres that will come online this decade to support the global flow of data and processing needed for the full SKA Observatory.

The AusSRC is funded by the Australian Government, CSIRO and ICRAR. The Centre is led by ICRAR and CSIRO in collaboration with the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, the MWA, the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Astronomy Australia Limited, and the international SKA Regional Centre Steering Committee.

For more information on the AusSRC visit: aussrc.org.

The AusSRC Design Study Program also recently undertook a survey of the radio astronomy data user community in Australia for the purposes of obtaining feedback to inform the development of the AusSRC. The results as well as conclusions and future actions obtained from the survey are detailed in the report available here: https://aussrc.org/documents/

Dr Karen Lee-Waddell, new director of the AusSRC

Credit: CSIRO

By CSIRO and ICRAR