LCO has recruited a number of professional astronomers who are commencing a range of programs designed to take advantage of the Global Telescope Network's unique capabilities.

Our science team are:

(add @lcogt.net for our email addresses)

Tim Brown

Nairn Baliber

Nairn Baliber is a Postdoctoral Fellow at LCOGT and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his PhD in Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin where, for his thesis, he designed and conducted a search for transiting extrasolar planets. In addition to continuing to dabble in extrasolar planet research, he is also monitoring members of young star-forming regions in order to study the angular momentum history of these stars. His most important duty in building the infrastructure of LCOGT and UCSB astronomy, however, is calling a weekly happy hour.

Marton Hidas

I obtained my PhD from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia in 2005. My work there involved setting up a new search for transiting extrasolar planets using the 0.5m Automated Patrol Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory (Australia). This project is now well under way and generating a steady trickle of planet candidates, eclipsing binary systems and variable stars.
I started as a postdoc at LCOGT/UCSB in January 2007. I will be using the LCOGT telescopes to try to confirm transiting planet candidates, and search for transit-timing variations in known planets. I am also interested in following up some of the low-mass eclipsing binary systems found by transit searches.

Rachel Street

Rachel graduated with a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of St. Andrews in 2002 having specialized in searching for extra-solar planets using the method of transits to survey open clusters with the Wide Field Camera on the Isaac Newton Telescope, La Palma. While no planets were found, the work encouraged an interest in the low mass binaries which are a natural by-product of this type of survey.
Rachel became involved with the WASP Consortium during this time and moved to Queen's University, Belfast to work on the SuperWASP project, contributing primarily to the development of the data reduction pipeline and to the selection and analysis of candidates. The WASP Consortium announced the discovery of two new transiting planets in 2006.
Rachel joined LCO in February 2007 as a post-doc affiliated with UCSB. In addition to SuperWASP, she is collaborating with the RoboNet microlensing project, using the LCOGT to identify planetary anomalies in ongoing galactic microlensing events.

Éric Depagne

Tim Lister

Eric Saunders

My research focuses on the use of distributed, autonomous software to solve problems related to telescope scheduling, coordination and control. My PhD thesis examined the best way to efficiently sample periodic lightcurves (for example, variability in young T Tauri stars), when those lightcurves are both undersampled and irregularly sampled in time. Using the geometric sampling technique I developed, I implemented an autonomous agent for the eSTAR Project which could decide for itself the best way to place new observations. The agent's choices are directly based on the outcome of previous observation requests, so it adapts dynamically to changing circumstances without human intervention. Scheduling multiple telescopes poses similar problems, but on a much larger scale. At LCO, I am looking at ways to allow the components of the telescope network to act together, so that simple observations are made easy, and complex observing scenarios are made possible.