I completed a PhD at the University of Cape Town in 2006, working on hydrogen-deficient stars and the peculiar variable V838 Mon.  My other research interests include T Tauri stars and assorted interacting binaries.  However, my bias towards the observational side of things soon led to an interest in instrumentation, which’s subsequently become my focus.

Since joining the SAAO’s Instrumentation Division in 2007 I’ve been involved in a number of exciting projects.  I was particularly privileged to be a member of the SALT Image Quality (IQ) Team that spent 16 months in Sutherland working on the re-alignment and testing of the telescope’s Spherical Aberration Corrector.  A six month stint in a lab at the University of Wisconsin in Madison introduced me to testing optical fibres and over the years I’ve worked with various instruments on the SAAO telescopes, both observationally and in a development sense.

I’m the Principal Investigator (PI) for an upgrade to the Cassegrain Spectrograph on the SAAO 1.9-m telescope and remain involved in aspects of the testing and commissioning of the Robert Stobie Spectrograph on SALT.  I’ll also be the local PI for SALT’s High Resolution Spectrograph that’s due to arrive later in the year and we’re busy putting together a wicked new optics lab in Cape Town that’ll be used for all kinds of nifty things…

Scientific Publications

Link to ADS