Additional Bios

Jeff Hopkins

Hopkins Phoenix Observatory
Phoenix, Arizona USA
BS in Physics from Syracuse University, Graduate work at University of Wyoming
Started doing photometry in 1980 and spectroscopy in 2008
Primary astronomical interest is photometry and spectroscopy of epsilon Aurigae.

Claudine Kavanagh

Claudine is a doctoral student at Tufts, studying science education.  She has got a BA from Reed College and an MSTE degree from Portland State University.  She is currently working as a program evaluator for education programs, but in the past has worked in formal and informal science education positions.  Claudine has been a HS physics teacher and an education program director for the Museum of Science, Boston.  She's operated telescopes for public viewing, and observed variable stars (Cygnus 27). She has done science education research, and right now, is looking forward to finishing up her doctoral degree by studying how children adopt scientific reasoning strategies.

David Benn

David is a Software Engineer, currently working in the area of hardware simulation and embedded software tools. He is a member of the Astronomical Society of South Australia (ASSA) and enjoys using his Meade LX90 to share the night sky with members of ASSA and the general public.

Having an interesting job is all well and good, but a desire to do more than just improve a company's bottom line and make a contribution to the scientific community has motivated David to work with AAVSO to develop a new Java incarnation of VStar (https://sourceforge.net/projects/vstar/), a variable star observation analysis program.

David enjoys bike riding with his family and playing the occasional round of golf with his 9 year old son.

Dr. Steve B. Howell

Steve Howell is a staff astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) in Tucson, AZ. He holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Amsterdam and has worked in a number of areas in astronomy including space missions, shuttle flights, CCD instrumentation, and educational outreach. Steve currently in working on research activities related to interacting binary stars, exo-planets (He is a member of the NASA Kepler mission Science Team), the LSST project, and is part of the NOAO team building a one-degree imager for the WIYN telescope. Steve enjoys hiking and backpacking, cooking, and playing blues music.

You can contact Steve here.