Appointment of ALMA Project Manager
15 September, 2008 / Read time: 2 minutes
The ALMA Director is pleased to announce that Dr. Dick Kurz has been appointed Project Manager of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) effective November 1st, 2008. Dr. Kurz's appointment follows a search by an international committee.
Dr. Kurz has extensive management experience in space and astronomical projects. He has been serving as Interim European Project Manager since February 2008. From 1999 to 2004, Dr. Kurz was ALMA European Project Manager at the European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO) in Germany. At ESO, he organized the European side of the ALMA collaboration. Dr. Kurz was Project Manager of the Gemini 8-Meter Telescopes and, before that, managed a variety of NASA and Department of Defense space programs while at TRW Space and Defense and NASA. Dr. Kurz holds a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California at Berkeley. He has published many scientific and technical papers on high energy elementary particle physics and presented ALMA at international conferences throughout the last decade.
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of Europe, East Asia and North America in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. The ALMA Board, consisting of members representing the partners, has created the Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) in Chile. The JAO is responsible for the overall leadership and management of construction, commissioning and operations of ALMA. ALMA is funded in Europe by the European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere, in East Asia by the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Academia Sinica in Taiwan and in North America by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC). ALMA construction and operations are led on behalf of Europe by ESO, on behalf of East Asia by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and on behalf of North America by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which is managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI).
