Beth Brown Joins the NSSDC Staff

By Joseph King

Dr. Beth Brown has joined the NSSDC staff as its principal astrophysics acquisition scientist. In this role she will be NSSDC's primary interface to such Science Archive Research Centers (SARCs) as the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC) at Goddard, the Multi-Mission Archive (MAST) at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and the Infrared Science Archive (IRSA) at Caltech. She will also help to "rationalize" NSSDC's legacy holdings of astrophysics data, in light of data supported at the SARCs, which are also to be permanently archived at NSSDC.

Beth originally joined the Astrophysics Data Facility of SSDOO as a National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council (NAS/NRC) postdoctoral research associate in late 1998 with a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and expertise in hot gas in elliptical galaxies. See http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nssdc_news/sept99/03_beth_brown.html for an accounting of Beth's background to that point. One of several highlights of her postdoc years was appearing as a narrator in the popular Milky Way video (http://space.gsfc.nasa.gov/astro/education/mw_film/).

Beth is on the Executive Board of the National Society of Black Physicists and is a frequent panelist of the National Conference of Black Physics Students. One of her first NSSDC assignments is to assess the cost and value of rescuing two file types from 2000 original NSSDC-resident International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) data tapes that were not picked up by the project or by MAST in their final processing and archiving activities. Community input will be sought on the value of the data file types.