Summary of Lecturers Curriculum Vitae
Stephen Eikenberry is currently the Colonel Allan R. and Margaret G. Crow Term Professor of Astronomy at UF. He completed his PhD in Astronomy at Harvard University in 1997 under Dr. Giovanni Fazio, and from there moved to the Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral Prize Fellowship in Physics at Caltech. He moved next to an Assistant Professorship (1998) and then tenured Associate Professorship (2002) in Astronomy at Cornell University, where he also won an NSF CAREER award in 2000. In 2003, he left Cornell to become a Professor of Astronomy at the University of Florida. Eikenberry has designed and built a number of infrared and optical instruments for astronomical telescopes, including serving as Principal Investigator for the FLAMINGOS-2 near-infrared imager/spectrograph for Gemini Observatory and the Wide-field InfraRed Camera for Palomar Observatory.
Manuel Maldonado Medina is a Mechanical Engineer (1999, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria) and has been working for 7 years on the design and construction of the 10-m GTC telescope and its instruments. He is also instructor and co-author of several SPIE papers. Manuel Maldonado is currently the responsible of Mechanics at FRACTAL SLNE Co, specialized in the development of astronomical instrumentation and software.
María Luisa García Vargas got her phD in Astrophysics in 1991 at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. For 8 years she had different researching and teaching positions at the UAM. At that time, she carried out the integration and commissioning of a 0.5m telescope and its instrumentation, at the UAM observatory, for teaching purposes. From 1991 to 1994 she had the responsibility of the teaching direction and development of several experiments and instrumental projects. After that, she took a position at ESAC (Villafranca del Castillo, Madrid) as Resident Astronomer to work in the scientific operation of the spatial telescope International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) of ESA.
In April 1997, she started working at the GTC project as Head of the Instrumentation Group. She was project manager of the in-house projects (Elmer instrument, focal plane arrays and data acquisition systems).
In April 2006, she funded FRACTAL SLNE, a private company specialized in consultancy, training and services for scientific projects and specifically for astronomical Instrumentation and software. She is the General Manager of the company and combines this task with her research activity in Astrophysics.
Enrique Joven Álvarez combined teaching experience about Electromagnetism in laboratory with research during his PhD Thesis at the Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain), in the Physics of Condensed Matter Department. He completed his PhD in Magnetism in 1991. This same year he got a position at the Technology Division (Detectors Department) of the IAC in Tenerife. Currently, he is Senior Engineer in the Electronics Department, mainly involved in astronomical detectors characterization and related facilities, working in several astronomical instruments. He also headed the Electronics Control Group of OSIRIS, the first optical instrument in the 10-mt Spanish GTC Telescope. OSIRIS is in operation at the GTC since 2008. In parallel to his technical skills, he usually develops activities related with science divulgation, as (no) fiction writer.
Nicolás Cardiel López is currently the Astrophysics Department Chair at the UCM. He started to get involved in software development during his PhD Thesis Project, when he created a data reduction package called Reduceme, specially tuned for spectroscopic observations. That package incorporated the novelty of using a parallel treatment of data and errors throughout the whole data reduction. Since then, he has always been involved in the development of astronomical software, most of which is publicly available. More recently, he is leading the development of the data processing pipelines of EMIR and FRIDA, two future instruments for GTC. He has combined this software development with his research work in the study of stellar population in galaxies. For several years he worked as a resident astronomer at the Calar Alto Observatory.