Keynote Speaker Announced for Annual Conference

We have a commitment from Dr. Namir E. Kassim as our keynote speaker for the annual conference to be held June 24 to 27. Dr. Namir E. Kassim received his B.Sc. from MIT in 1980 in physics, and his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1987 in astronomy. His thesis research was a survey of our Milky Way Galaxy at a wavelength of 10 meters under the supervision of low frequency radio pioneer Professor William C. Erickson. His scientific interests include low frequency radio astrophysics, large HF/VHF arrays, and HF/VHF Adaptive Optics. He has authored over 100 refereed journal articles in low frequency astronomy, several books and book chapters, and numerous conference proceedings.

Dr. Kassim is a pioneer in the resurgent field of low frequency radio interferometry, and has served as project scientist for the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) in Europe, and is currently the project scientist for the Long Wavelength Array (LWA) under development in New Mexico. He also serves as Chief Scientist for the LWA1 Radio Observatory, led by the University of New Mexico. He currently works in the Remote Sensing Division at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC and is Head of the Radio Astrophysics and Sensing Section.

A Renaissance in Low Frequency Radio Astronomy
Dr. Namir E. Kassim
Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC.

Many of the greatest technical and scientific innovations in radio astronomy, including discovery of the field itself, were achieved at low frequencies. Jansky’s detection of a long wavelength radio sky, as hot during the day as at night, was a shock to optical astronomers, and the Nobel-award winning discovery of pulsars near 81 MHz in 1968 was a milestone across astrophysics. But rather than catapulting the field to new heights, low frequency radio astronomy thereafter entered a period of dormancy relative to cm- and mm-wavelengths for several decades. With the emergence of an exciting suite of developing low frequency instruments across the world today, the field is undergoing a bold resurgence. My talk will explore the reasons for this evolution in a historical, technical, and scientific context. I will briefly review the new telescopes and the scientific goals motivating their development, including for the Long Wavelength Array (http://lwa.unm.edu) project in New Mexico.