UTD welcomes NASA space astronomer

by PegNews wire

At 7:30 p.m. on Jan. 25 in the Kusch Auditorium (Room FN 2.102) of the Founders North building (on the University of Texas at Dallas campus), Dr. Mark Clampin will hold forth on the subject of planets and (it says here) disks beyond our solar system. (Which would be what sorts of things exactly, one wonders?)

Doc Clampin's talk forms the nascent coalescing dust-cloud guts of the regular meeting of the Texas Astronomical Society, an amateur skywatcher and telescope hobbyist club affiliated with the Astronomical League. The event is hosted by the UTD Physics Dept.

If you're interested in space telescope science, Clampin's your man: he's currently an observatory project scientist on the James Webb Space Telescope gig, having worked his way up through the ranks at the Space Telescope Science Institute as first an instrument scientist and then as group manager for Advanced Camera Surveys. (We're talking parsecs beyond this sort of action, folks.)

Clampin's primary interests are in the formation and evolution of planetary systems, the direct imaging of exoplanets, astronomical instrumentation and stellar populations. He is also an avid collector of presidential thimbles and is only missing the Millard Fillmore.

(O.K., I made that last part up... but I'll bet he actually does collect something.)

posted by JM