HQ CORNER 2 MINUTES WITH...
HAO QIU POST-DOCTORAL FELLOW, SKAO SCIENCE TEAM The team based at SKAO Global HQ has continued to grow despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, and among the new starters is Postdoctoral Fellow Hao (Harry) Qiu from China. As Contact goes to print, Harry will be making his way from his current home in Australia to the UK, for a three-year role with the SKAO Science team. We managed to catch him just before he got on the plane.
REVIEW SEASON BEGINS AS PREPARATIONS RAMP UP FOR PROCUREMENT BY ANDREA CASSON A few weeks before SKAO’s first Council meeting, 2021 kicked off with a Progress Review aimed at checking our preparations for procurement as well as sharing knowledge and understanding across the teams. The latter took on even greater importance due to the remote working situation, as we’re not able to have those “corridor conversations” or catch-up at the coffee machine.
Welcome to SKAO, Harry! What will you be doing as a postdoctoral fellow at SKAO? Thanks, I’m excited to be part of the team! My project will focus on fast radio burst (FRB) science with the SKA precursor and pathfinder telescopes. I will mainly be working on the foundation studies needed to pave the way for cosmology with FRBs and radio transients in the SKA era, co-supervised by SKAO Project Scientist Dr Jeff Wagg and Dr Evan Keane, who was previously a Project Scientist at SKAO. My PhD was on searching for FRBs with the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP). You were a co-author on a recent paper that won the AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize, congratulations! Tell us about that work. I was part of the Commensal Real-time ASKAP Fast Transients (CRAFT) project aimed at localising FRBs to their host galaxy with observation data from the initial detection. Our work “A single fast radio burst localized to a massive galaxy at cosmological distance” was published in Science in 2019. This is the world’s first localisation of a non-repeating FRB, and it’s a major technical achievement by astronomers and engineers based all over the world, led by Australian research institutes. This observation technique has brought a further 10 localisations on single-appearance FRBs, and these new detections have greatly improved our understanding of the host environment of FRBs. So far you’ve been working remotely from Australia − what has that been like as a new starter? The time difference is certainly a challenge. Most meetings are luckily in the morning UK-time so I can still catch up, but it’s still quite late! So I look forward to being more involved after I arrive in Manchester. On the research side it is slightly easier, as I’ve been working with our collaborators at CSIRO Astronomy and Space Sciences (CASS) in Australia. The SKA is so international that I am getting used to working across different time zones! What do you hope to take from your experience with SKAO? The SKA is the next generation radio telescope that will expand our view of the Universe with unprecedented sensitivity. I feel it’s a great honour and opportunity for me to join the Science team and witness the development of the SKA, and I hope that I can contribute too.
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We began by reviewing the status of the key project and system level documents then moved on to the preparations for the contracts themselves, assessing what was ready, what still had to be done and what issues were foreseen, if any. Adjusting the procurement schedule as we went, we then examined organisational readiness for construction, stepping through all the business units one by one. This was essential in enabling us to see the good progress already made, check our assumptions and identify additional interdependencies. We exited the week with a muchimproved collective understanding of where we were, the action plan going forward and individuals’ roles within that. “The Progress Review has proved itself to be a useful tactic in highlighting where more attention needs to be paid and where uncertainties in external conditions, such as Observatory Membership, funding commitments and the nature of In-Kind Contribution Agreements need to be catered for in the ongoing procurement process,” said SKAO Head of Assurance Tim Stevenson, who chaired the review. The outcomes of the review led to key decisions being sought, and obtained at the first SKAO Council, allowing us to move forward with greater certainty. Since then, we’ve held the first four of our Contract Readiness Reviews (CRRs), for Mid Correlator Beamformer, Mid and Low Infrastructure Professional Services and Sole Source Software, the latter covering 17 contracts. These four reviews covered very different types of NEC contract so represented good tests of our preparation. They had wide engagement across SKAO, with the owning Project Managers and Design Authorities presenting, and the review teams chaired by Assurance and comprising people with similar roles on other contracts, procurement specialists, legal specialists, representatives from Operations and from the Science and Telescope Delivery Teams as appropriate. Over 140 issues were raised on these CRRs, over half of which are resolved and the rest are in progress. It’s expected that these contracts will be ready to enter the Invitation to Tender stage over the next few weeks. March will see us conduct CRRs for the majority of the Low and Mid Infrastructure works contracts, so we are making great progress towards our targets.
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