October 2003 Newsletter
Facility Update
Highlights of projects in Las Vegas, the Philippines, Brazil, Easter Island, the Seychelles, the Basin and Range and Idaho can be found on the facility web site: http://www.unavco.org/facility/project_support/highlights/2003/2003.html.
The Facility deployed a temporary, five-station GPS network in Yellowstone National Park in response to increased heat and steam emissions in parts of Norris Geyser Basin, http://www.unavco.org/facility/project_support/highlights/2003/yellowstone_2003/yellowstone_2003.html.
And the Facility supported a major effort to install instrumentation in the aftermath of the Denali Earthquake, both last winter and this fall.
The Facility also carried out an extensive evaluation of the GPS receivers being considered by the EarthScope Plate Boundary Observatory.
In September, Facility staff changed employers, from UCAR to UNAVCO, Inc. and moved all their offices into the new UNAVCO headquarters. This was a major undertaking that required an immense effort in planning and execution. It required a big effort on the part of many individuals to effect a smooth transition.
From Chuck Meertens, UNAVCO Facility Manager
The UNAVCO Facility has restructured in order to better serve new PBO responsibilities and to continue to provide quality support to community investigators and programs including NSF EAR and Polar programs and NASA. Network and Engineering support have been combined into an Engineering Group. A newly formed Equipment Group will provide technical and equipment support. The Data Group combines data management and archiving functions with project and operations database support to provide an integrated Information Technology support structure. A few engineers left the Facility to join and help create the PBO project. The new organization chart can be found at the bottom of this page.
We are pleased to announce a number of very capable new hires that have joined us over the past few weeks and to welcome these new UNAVCO Facility staff.
Steve Fisher (Head of the Facility Engineering Group)
Steve comes to UNAVCO, Inc., from Intuicom, a wireless data communications company that he formed and led for the last 5 years. Before his stint with Intuicom, Steve was employed by JPL as the NASA/SENH onsite program representative to UNAVCO, where he helped to provide programmatic coordination of the NASA activities. Steve brings 15 years of engineering and engineering management experience to the Facility. He managed many large-scale international projects, provided programmatic management for several NASA research programs and was central to the management of important ongoing initiatives such as the NASA Global GPS Network (GGN), SEHN GPS research application projects, the International GPS Service (IGS) and UNAVCO. Steve holds Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Geospatial Information Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he also pursued graduate studies in Business. Steve will head up the newly-formed Facility Engineering Group that is responsible for GPS network operations and field engineering for NSF and NASA core projects, NSF Polar projects, NSF PBO campaign engineering, and NSF Existing Network support.Chuck Kurnik (Head of the Facility Equipment Group)
Chuck will be combining his more recent experiences as the UNAVCO Antarctic Support Manager with his previous career talents as an industrial Manufacturing and Quality Control Engineer in order to head UNAVCO's newly formed Equipment Group. In addition to ongoing NSF and NASA equipment support, this group will have the new responsibility for the handling, quality assurance, warehousing, shipping and receiving, technical support, inventory, tracking and maintenance of PBO permanent station and campaign equipment. Chuck received his M.S. Mechanical Engineering degree (2002) from Colorado State University, where his emphasis was in data communications, and his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (1989). Chuck then worked as a Manufacturing Engineer and as a Quality Assurance Engineer with Nissan Forklift Corporation. He also worked with a flow and pressure instrumentation company as a Quality Control/Manufacturing Engineer. At UNAVCO, he acquired considerable experience with GPS networks and field engineering as well as project management.Oivind Ruud (Network Engineering Supervisor)
Oivind has worked at UNAVCO since 1991 in technical and engineering roles. He has extensive experience with global and regional network engineering, communications systems, and field engineering and project management. He received his B.S. and M.S degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1991 and 1993, building upon his Control Systems Engineering degree from Oslo, Norway. Oivind will be taking on supervisory responsibilities for the new Network Support Section in addition to his duties as the NASA Network Engineer.Jim Greenburg (Engineering Support Supervisor)
Jim Greenburg has worked as a field engineer at UNAVCO for over two years and has conducted campaigns and installed permanent stations around the globe. He came to UNAVCO with considerable experience with GPS surveying, including managing projects in Antarctica. He also provided technical support while working at Trimble and working on their hand-held controller design team and was a GPS/Surveying consultant and is well versed in GPS survey processing. He received his BA in Surveying and Geodetic Science from Ohio State. Jim will be responsible for supervising Facility engineers providing network and campaign field support for NSF, NASA, Polar, and PBO projects.Frederick Blume (Existing Networks Network Engineer)
Frederick Blume has a PhD in Geophysics from the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he did his thesis research in high-precision GPS measurements in Nepal and India. As a graduate student and later as a post-doctoral research associate at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), Dr. Blume led a number of GPS experiments in the western U.S., Venezuela, India, Nepal and Bhutan. He also has been the investigator and program manager of an IRIS/PASSCAL experiment for the last few years. Prior to entering his PhD studies, he had a six-year career at Amoco Production Company designing and conducting reflection seismological surveys in the field in Alaska. He also has an M.S. in Exploration Geophysics from Stanford and a B.S.E. from Princeton in Civil Engineering. Dr. Blume will be UNAVCO's primary participant in the new community Existing Networks project and will be providing Network Engineering support and helping to coordinate programmatic concerns for the project.Jon Davis (Administration/Database Assistant)
Jon has over 10 years of experience as an Information Technology/Business professional with expertise in administration, accounting, desktop publishing, web-development, database administration and development, and programming. Jon comes to UNAVCO from Sportsmedicine Management Group where he worked for 6 years as an office manager and database/web developer. Jon brings added capability to UNAVCO's increasing IT and administrative needs.
