2013 Fall Department News

by Tim Swindle

Dr. Laurel Wilkening, a former LPL director, has made a bequest to LPL to fund the graduate student field trips for the long term. Laurel was one of the first faculty members hired when the Department of Planetary Sciences was formed in 1973. She was Department Head

LPL is excited to welcome two new faculty members starting Fall 2013—Drs. Travis Barman and Walt Harris both joined the LPL faculty as associate professors. Travis and Walt bring diverse and unique strengths to LPL and we look forward to many productive collaborations.

Travis Barman moved to Tucson from Flagstaff

Patrick Harner; M.A. in Earth and Environmental Sciences, Weslayan; B.A. in History, College of William and Mary; interests in remote sensing and geochemistry.

Tad Komacek; B.S. in Geophysical Sciences, B.A. in Physics (Astrophysics), University of Chicago; interests in planetary formation and evolution, extrasolar dynamics.

Margaret Landis; B.S. in Physics

On July 24, Tom Schad successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation titled, "Spectropolarimetry of Fine Magnetized Structures in the Upper Solar Atmosphere." He has moved on to a position  as Instrument Scientist at the Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii (Maui). Tom's dissertation advisor was Professor Joe

Dr. Steve Kortenkamp has become the new Coordinator of the Teaching Teams Program (TTP). TTP, which is best-known for its support for preceptors in undergraduate classes, was originally developed by Professor Hal Larson. In recent years, Natalia deRoock has served as the coordinator, but Natalia is moving on to

The papers of LPL's founder, Dr. Gerard P. Kuiper, have been indexed online by the University of Arizona Special Collections Library. The index is available at:

http://speccoll.library.arizona.edu/collections/gerard-p-kuiper-papers

This finding aid is an excellent resource for scientists and historians and provides fascinating insight into the life and career of one of

Travel, whether to conferences or to work in other laboratories, can be crucially important for students’ career development, but is not always easy to fund. For the last several years, the Shandel Fund has provided some support for student travel, but the number of applications has, not surprisingly, exceeded the

This June, Dolores Hill, co-lead of the OSIRIS-REx Target Asteroids! program, was honored as a White House Champion of Change for her "dedication to increasing public engagement in science and science literacy." Through her work at LPL, Dolores, a senior research specialist, has been sharing her love of science

In May, the OSIRIS-REx mission received its confirmation, a major marker in the journey from proposal to actual mission. The confirmation gives the mission the authority to begin building hardware.

The confirmation provided the impetus for the retirements of two key figures in the mission, LPL’s Peter Smith, and Lockheed-Martin’s

Eneida Lima recently joined LPL as an IT Support Analyst, Principal. She comes to LPL from the UA Department of Computer Science, where she worked for four years; her responsibilities included instructional labs, desktops, and servers. She also led the migration of most of the department’s infrastructure servers to