I work as an electrical engineer and scientist on the Submillimeter Array (SMA), a project of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

I joined the project in 2003 to complete the installation and commissioning of the SMA Correlator Hardware. I am still involved in the ongoing maintenance and development of the correlator.

My background is in electrical engineering, with bachelor's and master's degrees from The University of Cape Town. I worked in industry for over six years, designing phased array side scan sonar imaging systems. My interest in astronomy was triggered through graduate work in applied physics with Paul Horowitz. I was registered for my Ph.D., advised by Paul, in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Harvard University (now the "School of Engineering...). My thesis work was a piggy back experiment installed at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, to detect highly redshifted neutral atomic hydrogen in the early universe, and it involved a lot of hardware design and construction. This type of work is now called "epoch of reionization" (EOR), and has become quite a popular observational specialty.

My work on the SMA correlator has tapered somewhat, since the SMA built and a fully operational observatory, and I have started to spend more time on my science interests. These include imaging of the event horizon of the super massive black hole (SMBH) in SGR A* using submillimeter VLBI, and high resolution imaging of the hydrogen recombination line masers in the peculiar star MWC349A.

A pdf image of a poster presented at the IAU 242 meeting in Alice Springs (2007) on the maser imaging work can be accessed here.

Here is a page with an abstract of my Ph.D. thesis, with a link to download the whole thing (text and images, 12.7 MB).

You can click here to link to a more personal (though still public) web page.