Hello to all our PandA Alumni,

I must start with a very sad event that overshadowed the past few months in the department, the unexpected passing of Distinguished Professor Mansoor Sheik-Bahae from lymphoma on July 10. He was 67. He is survived by his wife, Sherry, and daughter, Anahita. We remember Mansoor’s exceptional scientific career as well as his essential warmth and humanity. Many tributes poured in from afar as the news of his death spread, reflecting his far-reaching influence in the field of laser physics. We held an event to honor his scientific career on Sept 30, featuring talks and reminiscences from many colleagues and former students. We won’t ever forget Mansoor. There is more in this newsletter and on our website.

The department began a fundraising effort for an annual student prize optics to be named after Mansoor. If you would like to help make this prize a reality, please give here. Use the "Give in Honor of" option to specify that the gift is in Mansoor Sheik-Bahae’s honor.

Our alumni highlight this time is Isaiah Santistevan (BS Astro 2016). When Isaiah was a student here, I worked with him myself on Spitzer images of edge-on galaxies, a project that led to interesting results about the opacity of galaxies at far-infrared wavelengths. Isaiah completed his PhD thesis at UC Davis this year. It’s entitled “Modeling the Formation and Evolution of Satellite Galaxies in Cosmological Simulations”. He is now a postdoc at the Lawrence Livermore lab, doing more simulation work but this time on asteroid impacts. We wish him luck and will continue to keep tabs on his progress.

A very exciting event for us this semester was the October 14 annular eclipse. Albuquerque was right at the center of the path. We put on a big event on Johnson Field which drew about 3000 enthusiastic members of the public. Students led demos in physics and astronomy to an engaged audience. We also held a series of scientific lectures in PAÍS that were well received. The audience was able to view a live image of the eclipse, piped in from our heliostat in Regener Hall, during the talks, which paused before annularity so that people could go outside and view.

We took advantage of the event to fundraise for the second phase of planning for a new Campus Observatory. Thanks to generous donations, we raised about $20,000 for the full Planning Process, estimated to cost about $50k. This demonstrates just how much enthusiasm there is for astronomy amongst the Albuquerque public and UNM community! It’s not too late to add to the cause – you can still donate here.

Our research effort continues to grow: our expenditures last year reached $11.1M – double what they were 5 years ago! That’s an incredible achievement by our faculty.

It’s been a very busy semester and you can read about all the other accomplishments of our students and faculty below, as well as the arrival of our two new staff members Yvonne and Ciarra, who are making such a difference. I hope you enjoy reading, and of course I can’t end without a reminder that there are always many other ways to help via a donation using the link at the end of this newsletter!