The ALMA Board Extended Director’s Term Until 2028

31 January, 2022 / Read time: 2 minutes

We are thrilled to announce that the ALMA Board has unanimously voted to offer Dr. Sean Dougherty a 5-year extension to his appointment as ALMA Director from February 2023 to February 2028, which he has happily accepted.

The Board appreciated Dr. Dougherty’s leadership of the JAO and its staff, especially through the challenging last two years of the pandemic. The Board looks forward to working with Dr. Dougherty to achieve the ambitious goals of the ALMA 2030 development roadmap and consolidating ALMA as a state-of-the-art observatory to explore the universe in the millimeter/submillimeter wavelength range, enabling transformational science. 

Dr. Dougherty has been the ALMA Director since 2017. Before that, he was the Director of the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory, Canada’s national radio astronomy facility, run by NRC Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics, and served as a member of the ALMA Board representing North America.

Additional Information

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded by ESO on behalf of its Member States, by NSF in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC) and by NINS in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI).

ALMA construction and operations are led by ESO on behalf of its Member States; by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), on behalf of North America; and by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) on behalf of East Asia. The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning, and operation of ALMA.

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