2012 February 1:     Discover the Universe - astronomy training program for educators 

The Discover the Universe / A la decouverte de l’univers program has been funded by NSERC PromoScience. The program aims to empower schoolteachers and informal educators (youth group leaders, First Nations elders, park interpreters) in poor or geographically isolated communities to teach astronomy to their youth. This program will use interactive web technology to give these educators the knowledge, tools, and confidence that they need to teach astronomy. Our program builds on a pilot French-language course for park interpreters and is a continuing legacy of the 2009 International Year of Astronomy. As the program’s PI I am looking forward to the impact that we will have over the next three years.

2012 March 21:     Colloquium at McMaster

A colloquium visit to McMaster. I talked about how very faint z~2 galaxies grow their masses. An excellent trip with lots of good interactions, plus a dose of pleasant nostalgia visiting my undergraduate alma mater.

2012 March 19:     A bump up 

Today I got a letter from SMU’s President saying that he approves my promotion to the rank of professor.  Between that, tenure (this January), and my increasing absent-mindedness and decreasing attention span, I am now well on my way to Smith-dom.  All in all, a pretty satisfying year.  (Cartoon thanks to www.phdcomics.com).

2012 May 1:     Going to Japan for my sabbatical

I am awarded the JSPS Invitational Visiting Fellowship and will be spending a large part of my sabbatical year at Tohoku University in Sendai visiting Toru Yamada to work on the WISH space telescope project and other tasty science morsels. I also plan to spend some time at Kyoto University, re-stoking ties with my collaborator Kouji Ohta and his team.  Really looking forward to all the fun times and great science.

2012 June 25:     IAP conference

I am in Paris for a week to attend the Stellar Populations across Cosmic Times conference at the IAP.  Am giving a talk on the growth of galaxy masses at z~2. You can see the slides for my talk by clicking here.

2012 September 28:     SEDfit paper accepted

The paper on SEDfit - my spectral energy distribution fitting software - is accepted for publication by PASP.  SEDfit is arguably the original SED-fitting software that started the trend, back in 1998 with Sawicki & Yee (1998), for estimating stellar masses and other key parameters for studies of high-redshift galaxies. Given the number of students and colleagues that have used, and continue to use, SEDfit, I felt it a good idea to write up a description of it as a dedicated paper. And so this is it.  It will come out in the November issue of PASP, but in the meantime you can get it here.