Cominsky’s “Sabbatical” Year

It may be hard to tell, but Professor Lynn Cominsky has been on sabbatical during this past academic year. Although she is absent from the classroom, she has been busier than ever, and is often spotted in Darwin, when not on airplanes, traveling from one meeting to another. Cominsky’s Education and Public Outreach Group continued to grow as SSU physics graduate Tim Graves (’01) accepted a position as Instructional Technology Consultant, joining “Bad Astronomer” Dr. Philip Plait, Scientific Illustrator Aurore Simonnet and North Bay Science Project Site Director Sharon Janulaw, as well as students Sarah Silva (Web Curator), Michelle Curtis (Science Writer and Web Support), Tiffany Borders (Web and GLAST Telescope Network support), Linda Lindsley (GLAST Telescope Network programmer) and Gray Slater (Group Support.) Professor Gordon Spear is also working on GLAST, leading the GLAST Telescope Network development. During the summer of 2002, most of the GLAST staff will move to their new home in a building currently occupied by the Tech High School.

During the summer and fall of 2001, Cominsky gave lectures about gamma-ray astronomy at the Global Hands-On Universe Meeting, held at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Western Kentucky University, and—to over 800 people—in the Silicon Valley Astronomy Lecture series at Foothill College. She attended meetings as a member of the GLAST and Swift mission teams, and the California Science Project, as well as NASA’s Office of Space Science Education Council, and of the Experimental Program Advisory Committee for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. In September she organized press activities at the Two Years of Chandra Science Symposium in Washington, DC, where the big story, the discovery of an X-ray flare from the black hole in the center of the Milky Way, was televised by NASA.

In December, Cominsky was appointed to a committee that recommends policy to NASA: the Structure and Evolution of the Universe Subcommittee (SEUS) of the Space Science Advisory Committee. Her first SEUS meeting, in Cocoa Beach, Florida, was followed by the Coral Gables Conference on Cosmology and Particle Physics, where she gave an invited lecture, “How X-ray Experiments See Black Holes: Past, Present and Future.”

Press activities continued in January, 2002, when Cominsky helped to coordinate activities at the American Astronomical Society Winter Meeting in Washington DC. Besides her usual duties organizing and moderating several scientific press conferences at this meeting, Cominsky also ran a science policy Question and Answer session with newly appointed Presidential Science Advisor John Marburger III. In April, Cominsky organized press for the last time as Press Officer for the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the AAS, which met in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After six years as HEAD’s first press officer, she has passed the microphone on.

February found Cominsky again attending meetings of NASA’s OSS Education Council, and of the California Science Project. In March, Cominsky and Sarah Silva presented workshops to 7th and 8th grade girls about the Space Mysteries project at SSU’s Expanding Your Horizons day, and Cominsky gave the same workshop a week later to teachers at the National Science Teacher’s Association meeting in San Diego. In April Cominsky went to a SEUS meeting at NASA Headquarters to work on the “Roadmap” for future NASA missions.

Cominsky is looking forward to a short vacation with her horse, before starting to travel again in June. And she is eager to return to the classroom in the fall, to rest up from her “Sabbatical.”