10 Years Ago

For most of us, Sept. 11 will always evoke memories of that dreadful day in 2001. But it is just a date on a calendar. Every year has its own Sept. 11, and each edition has its own events and memories. For some, it will be a wedding anniversary or the birthday of a child. For others, it will be the day they started a longed for new job.

For me, the day will always be defined by the Sept. 11 of 1996. That morning, after six years of study and work, I stumbled through my doctoral dissertation oral defense at Brandeis University to complete requirements for my degree. I was one of the early users of the Very Long Baseline Array, particularly in the area of polarimetric observations, and produced one of the best early images from that network, an image of the quasar 3C309.1 that my former group at Brandeis uses on their home page to this day. I also did some interesting work on Mrk 501, a very popular source at the time. My unfortunately short list of publications can be found at the ADS site, along with links to PDFs of many of them. (That's a bone of contention toward my former advisors at Brandeis, who never got around to reviewing the numerous drafts I wrote to publish my research more extensively. I did much better work than this list would suggest. I recently put one of those drafts up on the web.) My most widely cited paper presented Monte Carlo simulations and statistical analysis of brightness ratios. Some time ago, I briefly summarized some of my research here. If you want to know how to process VLBI data in software that had better be totally obsolete by now, check out my once well read calibration memo.