Dr. McCandliss has been with the JHU sounding rocket program since 1988 and was the PI on both the 36.220 and 36.243 flights of the LIDOS instrument. He is the designer and PI of the FORTIS project, which is already under construction. Dr. McCandliss is currently working on an HST project to study the Lyman-Alpha escape fraction from nearby galaxies as a means of estimating the metagalactic ionizing background. He recieved his Ph.D. in Astrophysics from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1988.
Dr. Feldman has been at JHU since 1967 and has participated in over three dozen sounding rocket missions. Under his guidance as PI the sounding rocket program developed the UVX instrument which flew on the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1986. Dr. Feldman also led the program in a number of high profile comet observations including Halley in 1985-86 and Hale-Bopp in 1996. He recieved his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1964.
Roxana joined the rocket group in 2003 and controlled both 36.220 and 36.243 during flight. She has a wide range of experience, having worked with FUSE, HST-ACS, and Apache-Point NICFPS data in addition to her sounding rocket spectra of M20 and M42. Roxana is from Iasi, Romania where she got her B.S. and M.A. in Physics. She will be defending her thesis in April, 2009 before moving to her new post-doc at the University of Pennsylvania. She's an avid hiker whose trailblazing accross the Organ Mountains in New Mexico is unmatched.
Brian joined the sounding rocket program about two months before 36.220 where he was an excelant screw-driver-fetcher and heavy-thing-lifter. He also participated in 36.243. Since then he's worked on measuring the performance of the FORTIS secondary mirror and micro-shutter array in preparation for the construction of the new spectrograph. His current science work involves a Spitzer study of photodissociation regions and Apache Point DIS optical spectral maps of the Project Lyman galaxies recently observed by HST-ACS/SBC. He majored in Aerospace Engineering and Physics at Illinois Institute of Technology and targets his graduation somewhere in the 2011-2012 timeframe (after FORTIS' first launch).
Russ has assisted in building payloads and designing calibration experiments at JHU since 1977. He not only trains graduate students on how not to poke out their eye with the power drill, but also is an integral part of the construction of every sounding rocket payload for over 30 years. Russ is currently working on the decommissioning of the LIDOS instrument and preparing for the initial construction of FORTIS, as well as assisting another JHU experimentalist with her instrument design.
Kevin recieved his phD in 2005 after working on 36.186, 36.198, 36.208 and helping on 36.220. He now works at Colorado University on the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph team. Dr. France collaborates frequently with the JHU program, including helping observe at APO in support of Project Balmer. He is a member of the ancient and everlasting JHU Physics and Astronomy band, IGWAD.
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