Stephen Helsdon is a new postdoc working with John Mulchaey. He completed his degree at U. Birmingham and will be working on data taken with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

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Albert E. Whitford, former director of UC’s Lick Observatory and a postdoc at the Mt. Wilson Observatory decades ago, died at age 96 on Mar. 28.

Plant Biology

Kathy Barton has been gradually staffing her new lab. Postdoc Pablo Jenik, from Barton’s former lab at U. Wisconsin, arrived in Oct. In Dec. Khar-Wai Lye started as the lab technician. Rachael Huntley arrived in Jan. from Cambridge U. as a postdoctoral fellow, and Visiting Investigator Ning Bao arrived from U. Wisconsin to continue his research.

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The Ehrhardt lab welcomed a new lab technician from Stanford U., Dorianne Allen.

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Sue Rhee’s TAIR lab has a number of additions. Jill Tacklind is the new webmaster and has been working on updating the department’s Web pages since Dec. Suparna Mundodi finished her project in Shauna Somerville’s lab and joined the TAIR group as a curator. Tanya Berardini began her position as a curator in Jan., and in Mar. Alan Chou arrived as a postdoctoral associate. Peifen Zhang arrived in Apr. as a new curator.

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New arrivals in Chris Somerville’s lab are Heather Youngs and Erin Osborne. Youngs arrived from the Oregon Graduate Institute in Dec. as a postdoctoral associate. Osborne arrived from UC-Santa Cruz in Mar. as a lab technician.

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Aden Habteab joined the Somerville lab as a laboratory assistant in Apr.

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The department welcomed Susan Cortinas back in Feb. when she accepted the administrative assistant position. In Oct. Miguela Osbual started as the department’s new receptionist.

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Gert-Jan de Boer left the Somerville lab in Jan. to start his new position at the Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences in Amsterdam.

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The TAIR lab bade farewell to Mark Lambrecht, who left to accept a postdoc position at Catholic U. of Leuven, Belgium.

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John Christie left the Briggs lab on Apr. 8 to start a prestigious five-year fellowship at the Royal Society. He has chosen to go to U. Glasgow. Michael Blatt, a former graduate student who completed his Ph.D. with Winslow Briggs in 1980, was recently appointed the Regius Professor of Botany at U. Glasgow.

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Postdoctoral fellow Koji Sakamoto will leave the Briggs lab on May 1 to join the laboratory of Prof. Ken-Ichiro Shimizaki at U. Kyushu.

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Damares Monte ended her stay in the Somerville lab to return to Brazil for her position at EMBRAPA. Jeremy Gollub left Shauna Somerville’s lab in Dec. for a programmer position with the Stanford Microarray Database at Stanford, and Mira Kaloper left for a programmer position with the Yeast Database (SGD) at Stanford.

Rejane Guimaraes left Shauna Somerville’s lab in Jan. to start her new job at Oregon State.

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Miguel Ribas-Carbo left the Berry lab in Dec. for the Universitat de les Illes Balears, Spain.

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On Feb. 23 Winslow Briggs was an invited speaker at the Conference on Ecological Consequences of Artificial Night Lighting, held with the Urban Wildlands Group, at UCLA. The title of his presentation was “Plant Photoreceptors.” On Feb. 25 Briggs gave a seminar, “Phototropins: A New Family of Plant Photoreceptors,” also at UCLA. He was the keynote speaker on Mar. 9 at the Plant Biology Symposium held at U. Mass.-Amherst, speaking on “Phototropins: A New Family of Plant Photoreceptors.” On Mar. 27 he was an invited speaker, presenting the same seminar on phototropins, at a symposium organized by graduate students, “Sensing and Signaling: Molecular Responses to the Environment,” at U. Washington-Seattle.

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Stewart Gillmor successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis at Stanford and in May will move to CIMMYT near Mexico City for postdoctoral studies on apomixis.

Global Ecology

The Field lab has had a number of new arrivals. Jeff Dukes (Stanford) began his position as a postdoctoral fellow in Feb. Todd Tobeck arrived from Cal. State U. as a laboratory and field technician. Also new to the lab are predoctoral student Thuriane Mahe from France and three new field assistants, Jennifer Ayers, Helen Fields, and Vivian Schoung, who will assist with the seasonal harvesting at the Jasper Ridge research site.

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Greg Asner has been traveling extensively. His research takes him to the Brazilian Amazon, where his lab is studying the effects of land use and climate on biochemistry, soil chemistry, and the forest canopy. He also gave an invited presentation on the state of advanced remote sensing techniques for vegetation studies at NASA headquarters.

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Lab technician Amanda Warner arrived from U. Colorado in Dec. to help organize and set up Asner’s new lab. Postdoc Jeff Hicke arrived from U. Colorado in Feb. to continue his research with Asner.

Geophysical Laboratory

Wes Huntress was selected by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics to receive the Dryden Lectureship in Research, to be awarded at the Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit in Reno, NE, in Jan. 2003.

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Robert Hazen has been appointed to the editorial board of Astrobiology. His article, “Life’s Rocky Start” (Scientific American, Apr. 2001) was selected for inclusion in the anthology The Best American Science Writing, 2001, published by Houghton Mifflin. Hazen also presented lectures on minerals and the origin of life at NASA Goddard; Princeton; RPI; and U. Wyoming. In addition, he presented a lecture on scientific ethics at UC-Santa Cruz, where he has a joint research project with David Deamer on the prebiotic synthesis of membrane-forming molecules.

1•The Feb. 2002, Astronomy & Geophysics published Wendy Freedman’s George Darwin Lecture, “The Expansion Rate of the Universe.” She was also quoted in the Mar. 18, Aviation Week and Space Technology about the uses of the “revived” Nicmos camera on the Hubble Space Telescope. In addition, the May 4 Science News mentioned Freedman in an article about using the cooling rates of white dwarf stars as a new means for estimating the age of the universe.