Jandangga 2023 Welcomes and farewells

There have been many changes and moves in the CSIRO team, and we will be growing our cohort over the coming months as well. Career opportunities with us (and CSIRO more broadly) are listed on the CSIRO website.

As mentioned in Bec’s Blog, Kerry Ardern has joined those of us in WA. Some of you know Kerry from his ongoing involvement with the Observatory over many years. Kerry has made the temporary shift to WA for the next little while to support us while we grow the Site Entity team. Our RFI engineer, Dr Mohamed Manoufali, has moved with his young family up to Geraldton where he can get to site a bit quicker than from Perth!

Also based in Geraldton is the newest addition to the Site Entity team, Rob Rice. Rob is our ILUA Officer and his skills and experience are certainly going to make him a valuable addition to the team.

We were sad to see Geoff King leave for other opportunities, but he assured us that we would be missed! Geoff’s dedication and attentiveness to his work to his work on and around the Observatory will be hard to replace, and we wish him and his family well on his new adventure.  

Sadly, two of the ASKAP Operation team’s electronics technicians, Michael Reay and James Hannah, are leaving CSIRO for other opportunities.

Michael clocked up nearly 12 years working on the ASKAP radio telescope. He joined while the antenna structures were being put together. He installed our phased array feeds and other electronic processing cards as they arrived on site and helped make ASKAP a world class science instrument. He knew the instrument inside and out – quick to be on the cherry picker fixing the electronics, or on a call with astronomers anywhere in the world helping them look at the right piece of the Universe.

James will be another loss to the team with nearly 8 and a half years working for ASKAP operations. In the early ASKAP days James could be found unloading and installing the arrival of the new ‘digital backend’ the processing cards unique and critical to ASKAP. This was no small task with well over 800 cards to be installed and commissioned. More recently James has been critical in chasing down faults and carrying out repairs, as is always needed in highly complex instruments.

They will both be missed greatly, but we wish them all the best!

Celebrations were held for each of our wonderful team members as we said goodbye, but we also make time for birthday celebrations throughout the year! Before the Heritage Protection Committee met in late June, we celebrated Kerry’s birthday with a cake gifted by the Heritage Protection Committee members.