Who am I?

[Editor's note: This is a reproduction of a page Dan Briggs wrote about himself and his work. --Kathy Hedges]

I'm an astronomer specializing in interferometric imaging. My primary work has been in the radio regime, but I have some experience in with optical interferometry as well.

I am currently doing a postdoc at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), in support of the AIPS++ project. This project is a highly ambitious ground up reimplementation, replacement and extension for most existing radio astronomy data reduction packages. I have a web page for personal AIPS++ related information.

Much of my career has been associated with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in one form or another, including my spending 7 years in Socorro, NM working at the Array Operations Center, and attending New Mexico Tech for graduate study. I've worked on aspects of both the VLA and VLBA in addition to my more general software work. Even as far back as my undergraduate career at Caltech, I was working with radio interferometry on the Owens Valley Solar Interferometer

Here's a rather old CV(*) if you want the more detailed poop about exactly what I did and do. I'm too lazy to translate it to HTML, so you'll need a postscript viewer to read it.

(*) CV == Curriculum Vitae, which is academic speak for Résumé.

Here's a bibliography of my papers, memos and preprints. Some of them have links to the full document.

If you're really curious and masochistic, you can check out my dissertation, High Fidelity Deconvolution of Moderately Resolved Sources, which is available in its entirety on the web. Once again, you'll need a postscript view for most of it. If you want the whole thing -- beware! The entire document is well over 400 pages.

Speaking of astronomy, here's my favorite entry point into astronomical resources on the web, the AstroWeb database sorted by category at NRAO Charlottesville. There are a million such pages, but this is where I always start looking.

[picture of SN1987A from HST and the ATCA] Supernova 1987A

And here's a cute image of SN1987A that I've worked long and hard on. It made the Nature table of contents and is fairly important scientifically. I'm afraid that the original translation to GIF has been less than completely successful, and it's too inconvenient to dig the data off tape and clean it up. Our contribution is the radio image in the yellow contours. The false color image is from the Hubble Space Telescope Faint Object Camera. The important bit about my work is that we can now believe most of the features in the radio contours at a resolution about twice that of conventional processing techniques. This makes the difference between seeing the central hole and two hot spots aligned with the optical emission, and just seeing a nearly featureless blob.

Back to the Dan Briggs homepage.

This page was maintained by Kathy Hedges.