DATE: Mon,  3 Aug 2009 11:52:08 +1000
SUBJECT: MSc Scholarships in Radio Astronomy & Instrumentation available in NZ

MSc Scholarships in Radio Astronomy & Instrumentation in New Zealand
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We are pleased to be offering 3 Masters scholarships for 2010 to work on the
project "Searching for the Unknown: Transient Radio Event Sensor Network" which
is a project in characterizing and understanding the low frequency radio sky via
the deployment of a low frequency transient radio event sensor network across NZ
which will allow detection of transient radio events occurring at 15-20 MHz. The
core of the detector network will be the Digital Receiver Sensor (DRS) developed
at the Centre for Reconfigurable Systems, Auckland University of Technology.

The DRS is based around Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology which is
becoming increasingly important to radio astronomy. Depending on the
configuration, each DRS will produce up to 10MB of date per second and the
network of 10 devices will produced more than 8.6 Terabytes daily when running
at maximum capacity. In this project data will be streamed continuously over
the Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network (KAREN) and processed daily on
HPC facilities of partner investigators.

We are offering 3 MSc Scholarships in the fields of FPGA hardware design &
programming, antenna design, radio astronomy related software production & data
analysis, one at each of the partner institutions in 2010:

   * School of Engineering, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, (with
Dr Slava Kitaeff)
   * Department of Physics, University of Otago, Dunedin, (with Dr Tim Molteno),
and
   * School of Chemical & Physical Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington,
Wellington, (with Dr Melanie Johnston-Hollitt).

Projects are anticipated to commence in early 2010 and students with a
background in Engineering (particularly electronic and electrical engineering),
Computer Science, Physics or Astrophysics holding an honours degree (2A or
above) are encouraged to apply.

The scholarships will cover tuition fees and provide a stipend for a one-year
MSc by thesis for domestic students (nationals of New Zealand, Australia and NZ
permanent residents).

For further information on the overall project or applications to AUT please
contact:
Dr Slava Kitaeff (slava.kitaeff@aut.ac.nz) Principal Investigation

For applications to Otago or Victoria please contact:
Dr Tim Molteno (tim@physics.otago.ac.nz)  or Dr Melanie Johnston-Hollitt
(Melanie.Johnston-Hollitt@vuw.ac.nz)

We would appreciate it if you could forward this announcement to any students
that might be interested.

_________________________________________________
Dr Melanie Johnston-Hollitt
NZ SKA Research & Development Consortium, Chair
&
Radio Astronomy Group, VUW

School of Chemical and Physical Sciences
Victoria University of Wellington
PO Box 600
Wellington, New Zealand
Melanie.Johnston-Hollitt@vuw.ac.nz