UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
College
of Science and Engineering
School
of Physics
Institute for Astronomy
Fixed Term Lecturer in Astronomy
Vacancy Reference No: 3001897
1.
Introduction
The Institute for
Astronomy (IfA) is a research group within the School of Physics. The IfA is located at the Royal Observatory
Edinburgh (ROE) on Blackford Hill,
sharing the site with the UK
Astronomy Technology Centre (UK ATC). The latter is an establishment of the
Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC).
2.
The University of Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh is over 400 years old and is one of the
largest in the UK. It is Scotland's
premier research University, graded within the top few British Universities in
the recent National Research Assessment Exercise. It has roughly 4300 staff of
all kinds, 2500 academic and academic-related staff, and a research income of
£105M per year. Following
restructuring in August 2002, it contains three Colleges: the College of Science
& Engineering, the College of Medicine & Veterinary Medicine, and the
College of Humanities & Social Science.
The College of Science & Engineering is one of the largest Science
faculties in the United Kingdom with approximately 4,800 undergraduate students
and 1,200 postgraduate students, 325 academic and 375 research staff. Of the
research-active staff put forward in the recent Research Assessment Exercise,
78% work in departments graded 5 or 5*, and 88% in departments graded 4 or
better. The College consists
of 7 distinct academic units, or
“Schools”. These are the Schools of Biological Sciences, Chemistry, Geosciences,
Engineering & Electronics, Informatics, Maths, and Physics. The majority of
these Schools are located at the King's Buildings campus, approximately three
miles from the city centre. The College is also committed to high quality
teaching across the range of science and engineering within the distinctive
Scottish Education pattern of the 4-year Honours and 3-year Ordinary
degrees.
3.
The School of Physics
In October 1993 the
Department of Physics and Astronomy came into being as the result of a merger
between two previously independent Departments. In August 2002 the department
was further restructured and at the same time renamed as the School of Physics.
The School of Physics consists of Physics & Astronomy, the Edinburgh
Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), and the National e-Science Centre (NeSC). The
Head of the new School of Physics is Professor Andy Lawrence, previously Head of
the Institute for Astronomy.
The Institute for
Astronomy continues to occupy the Royal Observatory site on Blackford Hill (a
short walk uphill from Kings Buildings), allowing the astronomers within the
School to work in close scientific collaboration with scientists at the UK
Astronomy Technology Centre. The "Physics" component of the School is housed
within the James Clerk Maxwell Building on the main College campus at Kings
Buildings in South Edinburgh. It comprises thirty-five academic staff and over a
hundred research fellows and postgraduate students, and has research groups in
Condensed Matter Physics, Optics, Fluids, Nuclear Physics, Theoretical Particle
Physics, and Experimental Particle Physics. The Edinburgh Parallel Computing
Centre (EPCC) is immediately adjacent to the “Physics” section of the School,
and the new National e-Science Centre (NeSC) is in the centre of
Edinburgh
The School of Physics was awarded a grade of 5 in the recent research
assessment exercise, and "excellent" in the teaching quality assessment
exercise.
4.
The Edinburgh Institute for Astronomy (IfA) and the UK
ATC
The Institute for
Astronomy (IfA) forms a major research area within the School of Physics, and
also undertakes a vigorous teaching programme. The Head of the IfA is Professor
James Dunlop. There are eight permanent academic staff, two current Temporary
Lecturers, and a large number (roughly twenty) research and technical staff, as
well as around twenty postgraduate research students. The research programmes
undertaken at the IfA are quite varied, but the main strengths are in Cosmology,
Active Galaxies and Quasars, Star Formation, Low Mass Stars, and project work in Wide
Field Astronomy and e-Science. Both theoretical and observational work is
carried out.
The re-structuring of
the Royal Observatories led to the formal closure of the ROE as a PPARC
establishment, but the opening of a new PPARC establishment called the UK
Astronomy Technology Centre (UK ATC), as well as the creation of the Wide Field
Astronomy Unit (WFAU) within the IfA. The IfA shares the historic and beautiful
Blackford Hill site with the UK ATC, and the name “ROE” is now taken to be an
informal term encompassing all the activities on Blackford Hill on both the
University and PPARC sides. The ATC is the UK's national centre for the design
and production of state-of-the-art astronomical instrumentation. As well as
building instrumentation for the UK's existing optical-IR-mm telescopes, the ATC
is the Managing Organisation for the VISTA project, and plays a key role in
development projects such as plans for ALMA, JWST, and a putative extremely
large telescope (ELT/OWL). The ATC provides a valuable technical and engineering
activity alongside the IfA’s emphasis on theory and observation, as well as a
pool of project scientists also active in astronomical research.
5.
Astronomical Research in Edinburgh
There are around fifty
active astronomical researchers at ROE, as well as large numbers of programmers,
engineers, and technicians. The total number of people on site is about
150. IfA and ATC staff share the
site, with a single canteen, library, computer network , seminar and coffee-talk
series, so the effect is of a single large research institute. Research-active
staff can be grouped as follows :
• Ten teaching staff
in IfA (Peter Brand, John Cooke, Jim Dunlop, Alan Heavens, Andy Lawrence, Avery
Meiksin, John Peacock, Andy Taylor,
Ignas Snellen, Makoto Kishimoto).
• Staff elsewhere in
the University who undertake astronomical research (Douglas Heggie and Max
Ruffert, Maths; Alan Shotter, Physics).
• Seven PPARC or Royal
Society research fellows (David Bacon, Philip Best, Michael Brown,
Marek Kukula, Will Percival, Adrian Webster, Ray Wolstencroft),
plus one joint with physics (Arjun Berera).
• Six PPARC rolling grant
or EU funded PDRAs (Patricia Castro, Ross McLure, Stephanie Phleps, Nathan
Roche, Susan Scott, Eric Tittley)
• Project funded staff
who have a substantial fraction of time available for personal research (Nigel
Hambly, Bob Mann, Mike Hawkins, Peredur Williams)
• ATC scientists who
have some time available for personal research (Andy Longmore, Rob Ivison,
Alistair Glasse, Gillian Wright, Adrian Russell, Suzie Ramsay Howat, Mark
Casali, Mark Wyatt, Jane Greaves, Tim Hawarden)
• PhD students -
typically 20 at any one time.
A wide variety of
research is undertaken, but the main active areas at present are as
follows.
Cosmology Large scale
structure in the Universe, from optical, IRAS, radio and X-ray selected samples
of galaxies and quasars, and from microwave background data; optimised analysis
methods for redshift surveys and CMB data; theoretical and numerical studies of
large scale structure, the intergalactic medium, and galaxy formation;
gravitational lensing and its application in large scale structure studies;
processes occurring in the early universe.
Active Galactic Nuclei
(AGN) and related objects
Optical and X-ray AGN variability;
multiwavelength spectral energy distributions of AGN; observational studies of
obscured AGN and their role in the X-ray and FIR backgrounds; studies of AGN
host galaxies and their environment; ultraluminous IRAS galaxies; high-redshift
sub-mm sources; theoretical and observational studies of relativistic jets and
particle acceleration.
Star
Formation. Observational and theoretical studies of
the interstellar medium, especially shocks and proto-stellar outflows, and their
role in star formation ; chemistry of the interstellar medium; star formation in
external galaxies; sub-mm studies of Class 0 protostars and starless cores;
discs around pre-main sequence stars; disc and planet formation in protostars;
theoretical study of star formation in the early universe.
Stellar astronomy. Surveys for low mass stars and brown dwarfs, and follow-up study of brown dwarf candidates; the stellar luminosity function; parallax and proper motion studies including study of local kinematics from long plate series; white dwarf samples from colour and proper motion; the white dwarf luminosity function and the age of the disc; halo white dwarfs and the dark matter; infrared properties of variable stars as standard candles; symbiotic stars; Wolf-Rayet and other mass-losing stars; star clusters in the Magellanic Clouds.
The
Wide Field Astronomy Unit (WFAU). The Wide Field Astronomy
Unit at the IfA has several activities.
(i) It provides operations support for the UK Schmidt telescope and
maintains its plate library, as well as making photographic reproduction atlases
for world-wide distribution. (ii) The SuperCOSMOS plate measuring machine is
digitising the UK Schmidt surveys. The whole southern sky is on-line, and is the
first digitised sky-survey to provide three colours and several epochs,
including proper motions. A survey at H-alpha is also on progress.
(iii) We are the data centre for the new 6dF galaxy redshift survey (in
collaboration with the AAO), (iv) In collaboration with the Joint Astronomy
Centre (Hawaii) and CASU (Cambridge) we are developing the pipeline and archive
for the new UKIRT wide field camera (WFCAM) currently under construction. In addition we are leading a consortium
of Universities (UKIDSS) which will use WFCAM to undertake a large deep IR
public sky survey. (v) Edinburgh astronomers are closely involved with the VISTA
project: the ATC is the Managing Organisation for VISTA (on behalf of the
eighteen-University consortium) and Andy Lawrence is chairman of the VISTA
Science Committee. Data pipeline and archive plans are not yet complete, but the
WFAU certainly expects to play a large role. (vi) The WFAU is part of the
AstroGrid consortium, a funded e-science project working towards integrated
astronomical database access and advanced data-mining tools, as part of an
international initiative towards the "Virtual Observatory" concept.
Astronomical work elsewhere in the University. Douglas Heggie of the Mathematics Department is
a leading international figure in the dynamics of stellar clusters. Max Ruffert, and two related PDRAs, also
in Maths, work on a variety of topics including accretion disc theory, neutron
star mergers, and gamma-ray bursts. In the Department's Nuclear Physics group,
Alan Shotter and his co-workers work on nuclear astrophysics, including
cross-sections needed for supernova models. Experimental particle physicists work
mostly on CP violation and B-mesons, and theoretical particle physicists work
mostly on lattice theory QCD calculations, but a PPARC Advanced Fellow (Berera)
works partly on inflation theory and large scale structure.
Key
facilities enhance the
productivity of research in Edinburgh: (i) The Edinburgh node of the Starlink
national astronomical computing network.
Most staff and postdocs have individual Compaq Alpha or Sun workstations
which are connected to the Starlink network, and essentially all staff have
laptop machines. (ii) The Cray T3E
at the EPCC. There is a reserved quota of staff time. (iii) The SUPERCOSMOS
automatic plate measuring machine, Terabyte storage facilities, and Beowulf
cluster connected with it. (iv) The on site availability of the UK Schmidt plate
library. (v) One of the best astronomical libraries in Europe.
6. The new post
The new appointment is a fixed term lectureship. For this post there is no
specific preferred area of astronomical research. Rather we are interested in
any high-quality candidate capable of teaching undergraduate courses in
Astronomy and Physics whose research interests and expertise can either
link with or enhance/complement the current research activities within the IfA,
including the e-Science projects within the WFAU.
The post-holder will be expected to carry out a normal mixture of teaching and research. Teaching duties are allocated by a School committee in discussion with the lecturing staff, and in principle can cover the teaching of either general physics or astrophysics. However the expectation in this case is that the majority of the required teaching effort will fall within the Astrophysics Degree, and/or the first year Astronomy courses which are taken by a very large number of students from a wide range of degree courses. More information on our courses can be found at http://www.roe.ac.uk/ifa/courses.html, and candidates are welcome to make informal enquiries about the likely nature of the teaching duties to Professor James Dunlop (jsd@roe.ac.uk). The teaching quality of the School was graded "Excellent" by SHEFC, and we aim to maintain this quality. Previous teaching experience is not essential, but evidence of likely teaching quality is desirable. A PhD or equivalent qualification in physics or astrophysics is required, and a strong track record and promise in research should be demonstrated.
7. Further information on
the World Wide Web
Further useful
information can be browsed on the following Web Pages :
University of Edinburgh
http://www.ed.ac.uk/
School of Physics
http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/
Institute for Astronomy
http://www.roe.ac.uk/ifa/
Astronomy teaching
http://www.roe.ac.uk/ifa/courses.html
IfA research
http://www.roe.ac.uk/ifa/research/
WFAU
http://www.roe.ac.uk/wfau/
Royal Observatory Edinburgh
http://www.roe.ac.uk/
City of Edinburgh
http://www.ed.ac.uk/city/
8.
Terms of Appointment
The post will be for a
period of two years, and will be on
the Lecturer-A scale (£22,954 to £26,327 p.a.) depending on experience and
seniority. For candidates of appropriate experience/expertise an appointment at
a higher level may be considered. We also welcome applications from candidates
interested in job sharing. The appointee(s) will be eligible to contribute to
the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) or, if already a member of FSSU, to
continue within that scheme. The post is to commence on 1st October 2004, or as
soon as possible thereafter.
9.
Application Procedure
Please complete
and return the Application form plus a
copy of your Curriculum Vitae, including a brief summary of recent research,
intended future research, summary of any teaching experience and the names and
addresses of three referees to
Mrs E. Gibson
For those who wish to apply on-line, please follow the on-line application procedure at http://www.jobs.ed.ac.uk/
Please quote reference no: 3001897
REFERENCES. To save
time, please ask your referees to send their references by the same deadline
to:
Mrs E. Gibson
Institute for Astronomy,
University of Edinburgh
Royal Observatory,
Blackford Hill
Edinburgh EH9
3HJ.
INTERVIEWS. Note that we intend to respond to applicants as rapidly as possible, and
that we are planning to interview in August 2004.
10.
Informal enquiries
Informal enquiries about
this position may be made to Professor James Dunlop, Head of IfA
(jsd@roe.ac.uk).
Footnote
These particulars are issued by Human Resources, 9-16 Chambers Street, Edinburgh. They are intended to represent an accurate description of the duties at the time of writing, although this accuracy cannot be guaranteed. The University reserves the right to vary these particulars or make no appointment at all. Neither in part or in whole do these particulars form any contract between the University and any individual.