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Trustee News |
The board of trustees met at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington, D.C., on May 2 and 3. In addition to the full board, the Finance, Employee Affairs, Development, and Nominating Committees met. The board elected three new trustees: Freeman H. Hrabowski III, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Hatim A. Tyabji, a pioneer in the wireless communications industry; and William K. Gayden, chairman and CEO of Merit Energy Company (see story below). Kazuo Inamori, a trustee since 1990, became a trustee emeritus.
As part of the meetings, Gus Oemler, director of the Observatories, talked about the Observatories Enhancement Fund, and astronomer Alan Dressler gave an update on instrumentation for the Magellan telescopes. Bjørn Mysen of the Geophysical Lab discussed the latest plans to renovate the experiment building on the Broad Branch Road campus (see page 11). Wes Huntress, director of the Geophysical Lab, highlighted the status of the high-pressure facility (HP-CAT) at Argonne National Laboratory, and Chris Field, director of Global Ecology, described the new building for the new department. At dinner Thursday evening, Sean Solomon, director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, gave a presentation about the MESSENGER Mission to Mercury. Solomon is Principal Investigator for the project and discussed the science, engineering, and organizational challenges the mission presents. The meeting concluded on Friday with presentations from two new Staff Members—Zhi-Yong Wang from Plant Biology and Greg Asner from Global Ecology. Wang talked about his research on the plant hormone brassinolide. He is investigating how the hormone is involved in conveying information about a plant’s environment—particularly light— to regulate its growth and development. Asner began his presentation with a summary of the field of global ecology. He then talked about what his lab does specifically, focusing on his work in the Amazon Basin, where his group is trying to link human activities to remotely sensed properties of plants. Asner uses satellite data and extensive fieldwork in his research (see page 11).
The trustees passed the following resolution in recognition of Carnegie’s centennial:
That in this year of the centennial, the Board expresses its deepest appreciation and gratitude to the men and women of Carnegie science. Over the course of one hundred years, their passion for discovery, supreme ingenuity, and unyielding dedication to the truth have blazed a path of enlightenment that fulfills the dream of our founder: “to encourage, in the broadest and most liberal manner, investigation, research, and discovery, and the application of knowledge to the improvement of mankind.”
Telescopes for Biologists?
Alan Dressler, Staff Member at the Observatories, kicked off the grand finale to the centennial celebrations at the Carnegie Evening on May 3. His hour-long talk, “Telescopes for Biologists?” presented a succinct overview of the entire history of astronomy—including a lesson on optics—that provided the context for understanding what astronomers are doing now to decode the secrets of the universe and what new devices and research are planned for the future. Dressler discussed some of the big questions in astronomy today, including deciphering how galaxies were assembled at the farthest reaches of time, determining the composition of the earliest generation of stars, and finding and analyzing extrasolar planets. He also gave the audience a preview of the future, which will feature the Next Generation Space Telescope, enormous (20-meter-diameter and perhaps larger) land-based telescopes with adaptive optics systems, and NASA missions in the search for life. This last topic, Dressler predicted, is likely to dominate astronomy for decades to come. In particular, he explained how programs such as NASA’s Terrestrial Planet Finder and Life Finder are linking a broad array of scientific disciplines to answer the centuries-old questions: Are we alone, and how did we get here? Dressler’s talk provided a perfect overview for the discussions the following day at the All-Carnegie Symposium (see page 6).
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Alan Dressler at Carnegie Evening |
Carnegie Welcomes Three New Trustees
The board has approved the appointment of three new trustees: Freeman H. Hrabowski III, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC); Hatim A. Tyabji, formerly chairman and CEO of Saraide, Inc.; and William K. Gayden, chairman and CEO of Merit Energy Company.