Speaker
Description
Bio
Neil Rowlands obtained his B.Sc (Engineering Physics) from the University of Alberta in 1985 and his Ph.D. (Astronomy) from Cornell University in 1991. At Cornell, he participated in the construction and use of infrared instrumentation for the Kuiper Airborne Observatory and the 5m Hale telescope at Mt. Palomar. After post-doctoral fellowships at the Université de Montréal, and at the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing where he worked with infrared instrumentation, he joined CAL Corporation (Ottawa, ON), now Honeywell Aerospace, as an electro-optical engineer. Since 1995 he has been developing space-borne scientific instrumentation for the space physics, atmospheric sciences and astronomy communities. He is currently a Staff Scientist at Honeywell in Ottawa. He has been working on the Canadian contribution to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) project, the Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS/NIRISS), since 1997.