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Review of the Current Program
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- 2.3 Research, scholarship, and creative activity of the faculty 2.3.1 Highlights of the last review period
- An important goal of future hires is to further strengthen connections between observers and theorists.
- 2.3.2 Measures of quality
2. Review of the Current Program 2.1 Conclusions and recommendations from the previous External Review The full report of the previous External Review is given in Appendix Ij; a capsule summary is given here: The lead conclusion was that “the Astronomy and Astrophysics Department at Santa Cruz is excellent, among the top programs in the nation. With timely action, it can stay there….We endorse the plan [presented for the next eight years].” The committee then went on to highlight the following issues: 1) Strategic issues of faculty renewal are the most important single factor in the long-term health of the UCSC Astronomy program. 2) The stated strategy of broadening the Department by “developing at the borders” with Physics and Earth and Planetary Sciences is good. It “achieves the dual effect of meeting the aspirations of the Astronomy program and using its international reputation…to foster the development of other Santa Cruz departments.” 3) However, observational astronomy is expanding into other wavelength regimes, and the “narrow path of optical astronomy alone [even with theory] is not enough to keep Santa Cruz in the top echelon.” Santa Cruz needs to position itself to exploit the wide-range of multi-wavelength instrumentation listed in the 2000 Astronomy Decadal Survey, but such expansion needs to be tempered with “continuing strength” in theorists, who “act as glue” to hold the Department together. 4) The Department’s proposal to add four FTE over the next decade is adequate to address expansion needs, provided all retirements are also replaced. 5) The Department has experienced some recent disappointments in losing good faculty, hiring new faculty, and attracting high-quality graduate students. However, two recent faculty hires are very good. The faculty “has excellent taste and judgment in making new hires.” 6) Faculty salaries, housing, startup funds, and graduate student stipends are not competitive with leading institutions elsewhere. 7) Winning the Center for Adaptive Optics is a great coup. However, the Self-Study did not pay sufficient attention to maximizing the benefit for the local scientific program as a whole. What are the goals with regard to CfAO? 8) The range of courses offered in the undergraduate program is impressive. The Astronomy minor and the Physics/Astrophysics major are very good developments. 9) The time to PhD degree (median six years) is too long. UCSC should aim for five years instead of six or longer. The committee recommended that thesis committees be created at the Qualifying Exam to which thesis students would be required to report every six months. 10) The task of Department Chair is one that “no rational person would choose gladly.” The resources that the Chair has to solve basic Departmental problems are “extraordinarily small.” Chairs should not be expected to donate their stipends (~$7000) to fill out the Department budget, which has become normal. Administrative support is “slender,” and Department staffing is “about half the support the committee would expect for a group of this size to function well.” As the following report makes clear, progress has occurred on many of these issues, but several serious items still remain open. 2.2 Department vision Given the preponderance of faculty on the Observatory side (currently 15 out of 23 FTE), the core of our research expertise is—and must remain—in optical/infrared observational astronomy. This is mandated by UCO’s mission to provide optical/infrared facilities for the entire UC system. Our strategy has been to take this observational core and broaden it with theory, and the last Self-Study listed three areas of scientific excellence in which we would attempt to build programs bridging both observations and theory. These areas are cosmology and galaxy formation, high-energy astrophysics, and star/planet/solar-system formation. Seven years later, these choices still look good—all three will certainly continue to be exciting research areas through at least the next decade, and all three fit well with the observational, laboratory, and computational facilities at our disposal. However, our last Self-Study stressed that the science of astronomy is broadening, and excellent departments need to offer a wider research menu than in the past. The External Review committee agreed with this, and, indeed, the rather narrow research program at UCSC—theory plus optical-infrared observations—is the main reason given by recent graduate student applicants for not selecting UCSC. Our strategy since the last review has been to mount a top-flight program in observational optical/infrared astronomy and to broaden this core through a tightly structured program based on theory plus other carefully selected wavelength regimes. We recently started a program in gamma-ray astronomy by collaborating with Physics, and opening a second such program, in long-wavelength astronomy, is a goal of the next review period. Three strategies are open to adding the necessary expertise to broaden the program. One way is to partner with nearby astronomy institutions, a strategy pursued to great effect by other leading departments, such as Princeton with its nearby Institute for Advanced Studies and Plasma Physics Laboratory, UC Berkeley with the Space Science Laboratory and LBNL, Caltech with IPAC and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Harvard with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. The importance of partner institutions to the success of other leading astronomy departments cannot be overstated. UCSC’s natural partners are NASA Ames, LBNL, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and we in fact have programs with all three. However, our relatively greater geographic isolation has kept these partnerships from flowering to the same extent. This option is not dead, but it is not easy. A second way to broaden is by partnering with other UCSC departments, the strategy of “developing at the borders” articulated in the last Self-Study. We have made great progress on this during the review period and now have much closer ties with Physics, Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS), and Applied Math and Statistics (AMS). These partnerships have brought new strength and vitality to our program and are referred to frequently in this Self-Study. However, Physics and AMS are extremely small departments compared to other leading departments in their fields,2 which severely limits both their national visibility and the number of faculty they can devote to astrophysics. The health of Physics is especially important, as the presence of a world-class astrophysics program in the neighboring Physics department is a ubiquitous feature of departments we wish to emulate. The third and final way to broaden is by hiring new faculty within Astronomy. Studies have shown3 that scientific excellence strongly correlates with department size across all fields, and greater breadth is clearly the major reason. Our present allocation of 23 faculty FTE might seem large compared to UC Berkeley (17.5), Caltech (13), Harvard (17), and Princeton (16), but our effective faculty size is actually considerably smaller, for three reasons: (1) a large fraction of UCO faculty effort is directed to UC systemwide astronomy, which limits the time and attention they can spend on Department tasks, particularly on leadership roles; (2) two-thirds of the faculty are optical/infrared observers, leaving only eight to cover all of theory and all of multi-wavelength observations; and (3) of these eight, two are presently on leave in campus administration, leaving only six active at this time, which is actually one fewer than at the last review.4 We therefore believe that the Department size is too small to mount a top-flight program covering all the necessary bases, and we propose again, as we did last time, to expand the faculty by adding four FTE. Two of these positions are already in the Division hiring plan (shown in Appendix Ih), and two would be new. The extra manpower would allow us to fill important gaps in the present theory program, as described below, and also expand into one more wavelength regime, which we believe should be some aspect of long-wavelength astronomy (i.e., far-infrared, submillimeter, and radio). Four major new telescopes will open soon at these wavelengths that will be vital for research in star, planet, and galaxy formation. Our programs in these areas will be seriously incomplete without the ability to utilize these forefront data. The Department vision, then, remains essentially the same as what it was at the last External Review. We have made important progress towards many of the goals stated there, and the research program overall has become broader, stronger, and better integrated. However, the graduate and postdoctoral programs have emerged as needing attention, and the Department continues to suffer from lack of adequate resources. These points and others are discussed in more detail below. 2.3 Research, scholarship, and creative activity of the faculty 2.3.1 Highlights of the last review period: This section lists some notable achievements during the last review period, illustrating areas of recent scientific excellence. Research highlights:
Educational programs and human resources:
Instrumentation and facilities:
Leadership and service:
The above activities prompted considerable media coverage, including several articles on exoplanet discoveries by Vogt and Laughlin; press coverage on Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and its work; the DEEP2, AEGIS, and First Galaxies surveys; the size of M31’s halo; discoveries made with the Keck laser guide star AO system; and Prochaska’s gamma-ray galaxy counts, Woosley and Faber were filmed in two PBS documentaries. Information on faculty interests is given in bios in Appendix Ia, including brief sketches for astrophysics faculty in other departments. This information is also summarized in Table 1, which tabulates faculty by scientific area. It is seen that coverage in all three chosen science excellence areas is fairly good, but strengths in theory vs. observation do not always match. For example, many of our optical-infrared observers work on galaxy evolution, but the corresponding number of theorists is small. A degree of mismatch between the research interests of observers and theorists is historical at UCSC, to the detriment of close collaborations. New faculty Fortney and Krumholz have interests that overlap those of many observers, and we expect that their coming will help to knit the two groups more closely together. An important goal of future hires is to further strengthen connections between observers and theorists.  Table 1: Manpower distribution of astrophysics faculty by expertise and science area. Units are FTE. Includes administrators, recent hires, and affiliated faculty in other departments.
2.3.2 Measures of quality: The 1993 NRC survey of graduate departments rated UCSC Astronomy as number six in the country in terms of research excellence and number four in terms of graduate-training effectiveness. Details from this survey are presented in Appendices IVa1.D and IVa2.D. The next NRC rankings are not expected until Fall 2007. In the meantime, we believe that the most appropriate measure of faculty quality is citations per paper, commonly called the “impact factor.” Table 2 presents a summary of six impact-factor studies of space science departments since 1995 based on the citations tabulated by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). Strikingly, only two institutions, Princeton and UCSC, appear as top-rated departments in all six studies, and their average positions are similar, with Princeton perhaps an eyelash ahead. We note that UCSC has achieved this level of excellence without the major institutional partnerships that other leading departments enjoy. The last line of Table 2 lists rankings for the UCSC Physics department, which emerged as #1 in impact factor among all US physics departments in the latest survey. A second measure of quality is external awards and prizes. During the last review period, junior faculty Laughlin and Prochaska won NSF Career grants and Rockosi won a Packard Fellowship. Junior faculty Ramirez-Ruiz was appointed a lifetime Bahcall Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies. Woosley won the Bethe and Rossi Prizes of the American Physical and American Astronomical Societies. Miller was the fifth lifetime recipient of the UC President’s Certificate of Excellence in recognition of his outstanding service to the UC System as UCO director. He also received the Berkeley Medal, the highest award of UC Berkeley.5 Max received the Department of Energy’s E. O. Lawrence Award for her role in inventing laser-guide-star adaptive optics. Madau was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching. Faber received the Centennial Medal of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University and was elected to the Harvard Board of Overseers. Vogt was a World Technology Award Finalist for his achievement in astronomical spectrograph design and received both the Tinsley Prize and the Carl Sagan Memorial Award of the American Astronomical Society for his contributions to the California-Carnegie Exoplanet team. 
Table 2: Rank order in terms of average citations per paper by leading astronomy departments, based on data in the Science Citation Index. Max, Lin, Miller, and Woosley were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, bringing the UCSC Astronomy total to five. Woosley was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, bringing the UCSC Astronomy total to three. Faber was elected to the American Philosophical Society. In sum, based on quantitative measures as well as peer recognition, UCSC astronomy faculty rank highly. Our junior faculty hired during the last review period—Laughlin, Prochaska, Rockosi, Ramirez-Ruiz, Fortney, and Krumholz—promise to maintain and even advance this standard of excellence. Directory: about department about department -> Title: Postdoctoral Fellowship in Addiction & Physical Activity Research Site about department -> International trends in the education of students with special educational needs Download 222.32 Kb. Share with your friends:
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