SELF-STUDY
Department of
Astronomy and Astrophysics
University of California, Santa Cruz
June 2007
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Table of Contents
Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2. Review of the current program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.1 Conclusions and recommendations from previous External Review . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.2 Department vision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.3 Research, scholarship, and creative activity of the faculty. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.3.1 Highlights of the last review period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.3.2 Measures of quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.3.3 The context for planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.3.4 Partner organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.3.5 Extramural grant funding; overhead income . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.3.6 Faculty size . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.3.7 Faculty recruitment, renewal, retention, and diversity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
2.3.8 Faculty mentoring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2.3.9 Faculty workload . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2.3.10 Entrepreneurial efforts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2.3.11 Goals for the research program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.4 Objectives, overall quality, and direction of the graduate program . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.4.1 Graduate enrollments; time to degree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.4.2 Measures of quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
2.4.3 Graduate recruiting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
2.4.4 Graduate diversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.4.5 Path to degree, graduate student support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.4.6 Graduate curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
2.4.7 Graduate student research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34
2.4.8 Graduate advising, mentoring, and tracking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
2.4.9 Graduate facilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
2.4.10 Training of graduate students as future educators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
2.4.11 Astronomy graduate students in other departments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
2.4.12 Recent innovations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
2.4.13 Academic proposals pending for the graduate program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
2.4.14 Factors limiting the size of the graduate program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
2.4.15 Goals for the graduate program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.5 Objectives, overall quality, and direction of the postdoctoral program . . . . . . . . . 37
2.5.1 Review of the program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.5.2 Goals for the postdoctoral program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
2.6 Objectives, overall quality, and direction of the undergraduate program . . . . . . . 38
2.6.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
2.6.2 The lower-division curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
2.6.3 The Physics/Astrophysics major . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
2.6.4 Teaching assistants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
2.6.5 Undergraduate teaching quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
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2.6.6 Measures of program quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
2.6.7 Gaps in the undergraduate program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
2.6.8 Proposals pending for new undergraduate programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2.6.9 Goals for the undergraduate program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2.7 Administrative resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2.7.1 Department budget . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2.7.2 Department staffing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
2.7.3 Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
3. Future directions for the research program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
3.1 Assets and challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
3.2 Sample science goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
3.2.1 Star, planet, and solar system formation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
3.2.2 High-energy astrophysics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
3.2.3 Cosmology and galaxy formation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
3.3 New initiatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
3.3.1 Computational astrophysics initiative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
3.3.2 Long-wavelength astronomy initiative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.3.3 Development initiative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.4 Faculty hiring plan and schedule . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
4. Critical issues and strategies to deal with them . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4.1 Faculty FTE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4.2 Graduate and postdoctoral programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4.3 Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4.4 Campus support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4.5 Generating new resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
External Review Appendices
I
Overall Departmental Profile
Ia Faculty Curriculum Vitae
Ib.1 Total Departmental Extramural Research Funding
Ib.2 Astronomy Grant and Overhead Summary
Ic List of External Seminar and Colloquium Speakers
Id History of Department Chair Appointments and Plans for Succession
Ie Departmental Instructional Load Policy.
If.1 Operational and Temporary Academic Staffing Budgets
If.2 Campus-Provided Funds vs. Expenditures: 10-Year History
If.3 Detailed Budget Breakdown, 2006-07
Ig Academic Plan 2005 Update
Ih Divisional Hiring Plan (Search Years)
Ii New Degree Proposals Pending
Ij External Review Report Astronomy 2000
Ik Campus Closure Report from Astronomy External Review June 2001
Il Dean's 18 Month Follow-up to Astronomy External Review February 2003
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53
53
54
54
54
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II
Graduate Program Profile
IIa Astronomy Graduate Handbook Website Address
IIb Astronomy Graduate Catalog Website Address
IIc Astronomy Graduate Course Syllabi File
IId Graduate Student Alumni (13-Year History)
III Undergraduate Program Profile
IIIa Astrophysics Undergraduate Handbook
IIIb Undergraduate Catalog Copy
IIIc Astronomy Undergraduate Course Syllabi File
IIId Astrophysics Senior Thesis Students
IV Statistics
DEPARTMENTAL SCHOLARSHIP
IVa1.D 1993 NRC Ranking of Department vs. Nationwide Rankings
IVa2.D 1993 NRC Ranking of Department vs. Other UC Astronomy Departments
IVb.D
Ladder Faculty Roster and Demographic Distribution
IVd.D
Summary of All Astronomy Enrollments
IVd.D
Student Workload, Total Faculty, and Workload Ratio; Faculty Budgeted
FTE History and Payroll Faculty FTE History
IVe.D
Ladder Payroll Faculty Course Load and Enrollment History
IVf.D
History of TAS, TA, and Grader Budgets from the Division
GRADUATE PROGRAM
IVa.G
History of Graduate Degrees Conferred
IVb.G
Graduate Enrollments and Degrees Conferred
IVc.G
Ethnicity and Gender Diversity of Graduate Students
UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM
IVa.U
Headcount Majors History
IVb.U
History of Degrees Conferred and Ethnic and Gender Diversity of Majors
V Graduate Student Data
Va
History of Astronomy Graduate Student Support
Vb
Graduate Student Recruitment Statistics
VI Department General Curriculum Data
VIa
Astronomy Course Offerings Fall 2003-Spring 2006
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ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS SELF-STUDY
June 2007
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz is among the
best in the nation, and we aspire to become even better. This report covers our activities
since the last Self-Study, which was written in January 2000. Our record of achievement
since then is strong. We founded and continue to lead a major high-performance
computational astrophysics consortium, commissioned a powerful mini-supercomputer
on campus, and forged close ties with three other UCSC departments also doing
astrophysics. On the science side, we continued to be world leaders in the discovery of
extrasolar planets, and we led two path-breaking surveys that pushed the understanding
of galaxy formation back to early epochs. In collaboration with Physics, we are in the
process of expanding our research into the new wavelength regime of gamma-ray
astronomy. For the sixth time in a row, our papers ranked among the top five astronomy
departments in terms of impact factor, a record equaled by only one other university.
On the instrument side, we delivered a major spectrograph to Keck, brought the
NSF Center for Adaptive Optics to successful maturity, co-founded a large telescope on
Mt. Hamilton dedicated to extrasolar planet-finding, and launched what we hope will
(again) be the first in the next generation of giant ground-based optical telescopes.
Academically, we inaugurated a vigorous undergraduate Astrophysics major with the
Physics Department, and class enrollments at graduate and undergraduate levels
increased by 20% and 30% respectively; the number of registered graduate students grew
by 50%. UCSC astronomers served in vital national leadership roles and served on the
boards of numerous universities, laboratories, and non-profit scientific organizations.
Our service to UCSC was strong, and three of our faculty now hold leadership
administrative posts on campus. Most important, we began to transition successfully
from the first generation of leaders who founded the Santa Cruz department to the next
generation of younger researchers who will carry it forward. Our newest faculty are
among the most talented in the world in their fields.
However, the world of astronomical research continues to evolve, and we
perceive strong pressures to adapt our program to deal with trends that are already
evident and promise to strengthen in future. This Self-Study reviews the current status of
Department programs and relations with our sister units the University of California
Observatories and the Center for Adaptive Optics. It then presents the strategies that we
propose to advance the quality of our research and educational programs over the next
decade. In setting goals, our standards are those of the top few astronomy departments in
the nation.
Major assets of the program include: a distinguished faculty; an integrated
research program that is well matched to the expertise of our faculty and to coming
scientific opportunities; close partnerships with the University of California
Observatories and the Center for Adaptive Optics that foster powerful collaborations
5
among theorists, observers, and instrument-builders on problems of common interest;
interdisciplinary research programs that span four departments (Astronomy, Physics,
Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Applied Math and Statistics); and an exceptionally
large group of faculty (fourteen in all) with expertise in high-performance computational
astrophysics. Our students have access to excellent computing and telescope facilities
and participate in state-of-the-art instrumentation projects. Our recently inaugurated
undergraduate Astrophysics major (with Physics) is attracting large numbers of students.
Major challenges include: a faculty that, though large, is strongly weighted
toward UCO optical-infrared astronomers, leaving very few Department FTE to cover all
of theory and all other wavelength domains combined; a research program that is narrow
as a result of this and has trouble attracting the number of graduate students of the quality
we would like; an underdeveloped postdoctoral program due to the lack of prestigious
prize postdoctoral fellowships of the sort that competing astronomy departments now
offer routinely; and a geographic isolation that has impeded partnerships with other major
astronomical institutions. Lack of adequate staff and financial resources are additional
handicaps.
To address these problems, our most important request is for four additional
Department faculty, to arrive by 2010-11. Two of these are already-approved theory
positions to fill important gaps in the current research program—hiring these will add
needed strength and depth to programs we already have. One of these should be a senior
theorist to balance the large number of junior faculty we are hiring and to provide
leadership continuity in the face of retirements. The two new positions would be used to
start a new initiative in long-wavelength astronomy, at far-IR, submillimeter, and/or
radio wavelengths. Such long-wavelength data are emerging as essential for studying
star, planet, and galaxy formation, and four exciting new ground and space observatories
will come on line soon at these wavelengths. Access to these facilities is crucial for our
research programs, and the resulting broader research opportunities will attract more and
better graduate students. A long-wavelength initiative was recommended at the last
External Review but proved impossible because of campus budget cuts—now is the right
time to restart it. A major goal for the coming year is to figure out how to invest in this
broad and varied spectral region and what kind of faculty would make sense, whether
observers, theorists, or both.
We stress that our criterion for faculty selection is always to hire exceptional
people rather than slavishly follow a plan. The above vision provides an overall scenario
but may need tuning depending on circumstances. Prompt approval and hiring of all
four FTE before 2011 is very important, as explained in the text.
In the next review period, astronomers propose to become much more active in
outreach and development than previously. A top priority for new funds is endowed
UCSC prize postdoctoral fellowships. Postdoctoral talent has become a highly visible
barometer of department quality, and excellent postdocs are a key element in attracting
and retaining excellent faculty and students. Santa Cruz is the only leading astronomy
department in the nation without its own prize postdoctoral fellowships. This is
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widely recognized in the astronomical community (to our detriment), and it must be
addressed.
The second top priority for new funds is a research center specializing in highperformance computational astrophysics, which we have tentatively named the Center
for Cosmic Origin Simulations and Visualization (COSV). Such a center would
provide an intellectual home for interdisciplinary astrophysics faculty, create a vibrant
scientific community to lure the best graduate students and postdocs, and help to attract
resources for the next generation of high-performance supercomputers, which are as
necessary to theorists as telescopes are to observers. An alternative vision for COSV is a
theory institute attached to the Thirty-Meter Telescope. Either way, such a center would
propel the UCSC astrophysics group to world visibility, as the Center for Adaptive Optics
did for AO. We are researching external funding opportunities but will need strong
campus backing for space, specialized facilities, and matching funds.
Further high priorities for fund-raising are graduate student fellowships and the
Department endowment.
Within the Department we will make major efforts to improve the quality and
efficiency of the graduate program. We will work hard to attract more and better
applicants, particularly in theory, by advertising our talented faculty and the collaborative
research programs we now offer with other departments—a four-department outreach
campaign is underway for Fall 2007. International students are especially important for
theory, and we will attract them through better advertising, making more creative use of
available funds, and seeking privately endowed graduate fellowships aimed particularly
at international students. We also need to improve mentoring and time to degree in the
graduate program, and a study is currently underway, with results available in time for
the External Review.
In the undergraduate arena, we will work hard to groom our best students for
admission to elite astronomy graduate schools. We ask campus help to fill a major gap in
the undergraduate program, which needs a first-class undergraduate astrophysics
laboratory.
The final issue is Department resources. The Department cash budget does not
cover normal expenses, let alone meet emergencies, seed new activities, or cover
anticipated new development expenses. Abnormally low overhead return by the
standards of other leading universities is a major reason. The second problem is lack of
adequate staff support. The Astronomy Department staff is about half of what it needs
to be, and important jobs are not getting done or are being done expensively by the wrong
people. Astronomy’s situation is typical and reflects UCSC’s historical policy of starving
the academic departments. This flawed policy invests large sums in faculty salaries and
then proceeds to waste much of it through inadequate support. Faculty time is precious
and expensive. UCSC needs to re-examine its spending policies to maximize overall
campus productivity.
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1. Introduction
The last Self-Study and External Review of the Astronomy Department took
place in 1999-2000. The planning horizon of the present document is the eight years to
the next review, 2014-15.
Since the institutional structure of UCSC Astronomy is somewhat unusual, we
start with a brief orientation. The current Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
was founded in 1966, when the Lick Observatory astronomical staff moved from Mt.
Hamilton to the new Santa Cruz campus. These Lick observers formed the core of the
new department, which was soon augmented, under the vision of Robert Kraft, by a small
number of theoretical faculty. The distinction between “Observatory” and “Department”
continues today—the current 15 UCO faculty are paid 80% out of Observatory funds and
20% out of campus funds on 11-month appointments, while the eight Department faculty
are paid 100% from campus funds on 9-month appointments.1 UCO faculty are expected
to devote a large fraction of their UC service to supporting UC systemwide astronomy,
whereas the UC service of Department faculty is devoted purely to academic functions.
In practice, it is impossible to divide the effort of the UCO faculty cleanly between the
Department and Observatory because research and research supervision are part of the
mission of both units. The two faculties cooperate closely to mount the joint academic
and research programs, and UCO faculty spend considerably more than 20% of their
time—and probably closer to 50%—on the academic side if research supervision is
included in addition to teaching and Department service. However, by necessity and by
tradition, UCO’s role in running the Department is limited, which is an important factor
in determining the effective manpower available to the academic program.
Yet a third astronomy unit is the Center for Adaptive Optics, an NSF Science and
Technology Center founded in 1999. Several UCO faculty and many graduate students
participate in CfAO research, and the director is a UCO faculty member. NSF funding
for CfAO will sunset in November 2009, and active efforts are underway to find support
to continue activities beyond that. CfAO is pursuing “multi-campus” status within the
University of California and plans to continue its community-building activities such as
workshops, retreats, and conferences. As an NSF Center, CfAO has developed very
effective education and outreach activities, which will also be continued past 2009 using
a variety of external funding sources.
Given the above intermeshing programs, it is important to clarify what the present
review covers—specifically, the research and academic activities of all faculty, service of
all types by Department faculty, external service (outside the Observatory and CfAO) by
UCO faculty, and future hiring plans for Department faculty. Not covered is service to
the Observatory’s technical and instrument programs, the education and human resources
1
Eleven-month salaries are 16% more than 9-month salaries for the same rank and step,
as opposed to the 22% that would be predicted on the basis of the number of months
alone.
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programs of CfAO, or future hiring plans for UCO faculty. These aspects of UCO and
CfAO have separate reviews and are mentioned here for context only.
In what follows, the term “Department faculty” refers to the 9-month faculty who
are not UCO members, while “Astronomy faculty” encompasses both groups. The
“Department office” is the academic office (with two FTE), as distinct from the UCO
Business Office, which, in addition to servicing UCO, provides business services for all
faculty. The “Department budget” denotes the resources available to the Department
Chair for running the academic program, which again is separate from the much larger
UCO budget and serves distinctly different functions.
The body of this report is in three sections following a newly mandated campus
format. Section 2 is a review of the current program, starting with the conclusions and
recommendations of the previous External Review and going on to evaluate faculty
research, graduate education, the postdoctoral program, and undergraduate education.
Each subsection concludes with a list of goals for the future. Section 2 also includes a
review of resources provided by the campus to the Department, including space, staffing,
and budget. Section 3 presents proposed major new initiatives for the next review period,
together with the resources needed to create them. Section 4 summarizes critical issues
and strategies to deal with them. Thirty-eight appendices provide additional data.
2. Review of the Current Program
2.1 Conclusions and recommendations from the previous External Review
The full report of the previous External Review is given in Appendix Ij; a capsule
summary is given here:
The lead conclusion was that “the Astronomy and Astrophysics Department at
Santa Cruz is excellent, among the top programs in the nation. With timely action, it can
stay there….We endorse the plan [presented for the next eight years].” The committee
then went on to highlight the following issues:
1) Strategic issues of faculty renewal are the most important single factor in the
long-term health of the UCSC Astronomy program.
2) The stated strategy of broadening the Department by “developing at the
borders” with Physics and Earth and Planetary Sciences is good. It “achieves the
dual effect of meeting the aspirations of the Astronomy program and using its
international reputation…to foster the development of other Santa Cruz
departments.”
3) However, observational astronomy is expanding into other wavelength
regimes, and the “narrow path of optical astronomy alone [even with theory] is
not enough to keep Santa Cruz in the top echelon.” Santa Cruz needs to position
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itself to exploit the wide-range of multi-wavelength instrumentation listed in the
2000 Astronomy Decadal Survey, but such expansion needs to be tempered with
“continuing strength” in theorists, who “act as glue” to hold the Department
together.
4) The Department’s proposal to add four FTE over the next decade is adequate
to address expansion needs, provided all retirements are also replaced.
5) The Department has experienced some recent disappointments in losing good
faculty, hiring new faculty, and attracting high-quality graduate students.
However, two recent faculty hires are very good. The faculty “has excellent taste
and judgment in making new hires.”
6) Faculty salaries, housing, startup funds, and graduate student stipends are not
competitive with leading institutions elsewhere.
7) Winning the Center for Adaptive Optics is a great coup. However, the SelfStudy did not pay sufficient attention to maximizing the benefit for the local
scientific program as a whole. What are the goals with regard to CfAO?
8) The range of courses offered in the undergraduate program is impressive. The
Astronomy minor and the Physics/Astrophysics major are very good
developments.
9) The time to PhD degree (median six years) is too long. UCSC should aim for
five years instead of six or longer. The committee recommended that thesis
committees be created at the Qualifying Exam to which thesis students would be
required to report every six months.
10) The task of Department Chair is one that “no rational person would choose
gladly.” The resources that the Chair has to solve basic Departmental problems
are “extraordinarily small.” Chairs should not be expected to donate their
stipends (~$7000) to fill out the Department budget, which has become normal.
Administrative support is “slender,” and Department staffing is “about half the
support the committee would expect for a group of this size to function well.”
As the following report makes clear, progress has occurred on many of these
issues, but several serious items still remain open.
2.2 Department vision
Given the preponderance of faculty on the Observatory side (currently 15 out of
23 FTE), the core of our research expertise is—and must remain—in optical/infrared
observational astronomy. This is mandated by UCO’s mission to provide optical/infrared
facilities for the entire UC system. Our strategy has been to take this observational core
and broaden it with theory, and the last Self-Study listed three areas of scientific
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excellence in which we would attempt to build programs bridging both observations and
theory. These areas are cosmology and galaxy formation, high-energy astrophysics,
and star/planet/solar-system formation. Seven years later, these choices still look
good—all three will certainly continue to be exciting research areas through at least the
next decade, and all three fit well with the observational, laboratory, and computational
facilities at our disposal.
However, our last Self-Study stressed that the science of astronomy is broadening,
and excellent departments need to offer a wider research menu than in the past. The
External Review committee agreed with this, and, indeed, the rather narrow research
program at UCSC—theory plus optical-infrared observations—is the main reason given
by recent graduate student applicants for not selecting UCSC. Our strategy since the last
review has been to mount a top-flight program in observational optical/infrared
astronomy and to broaden this core through a tightly structured program based on
theory plus other carefully selected wavelength regimes. We recently started a
program in gamma-ray astronomy by collaborating with Physics, and opening a second
such program, in long-wavelength astronomy, is a goal of the next review period.
Three strategies are open to adding the necessary expertise to broaden the
program. One way is to partner with nearby astronomy institutions, a strategy pursued to
great effect by other leading departments, such as Princeton with its nearby Institute for
Advanced Studies and Plasma Physics Laboratory, UC Berkeley with the Space Science
Laboratory and LBNL, Caltech with IPAC and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and
Harvard with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. The importance of partner
institutions to the success of other leading astronomy departments cannot be overstated.
UCSC’s natural partners are NASA Ames, LBNL, and Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory, and we in fact have programs with all three. However, our relatively greater
geographic isolation has kept these partnerships from flowering to the same extent. This
option is not dead, but it is not easy.
A second way to broaden is by partnering with other UCSC departments, the
strategy of “developing at the borders” articulated in the last Self-Study. We have made
great progress on this during the review period and now have much closer ties with
Physics, Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS), and Applied Math and Statistics (AMS).
These partnerships have brought new strength and vitality to our program and are
referred to frequently in this Self-Study. However, Physics and AMS are extremely
small departments compared to other leading departments in their fields,2 which severely
limits both their national visibility and the number of faculty they can devote to
astrophysics. The health of Physics is especially important, as the presence of a worldclass astrophysics program in the neighboring Physics department is a ubiquitous feature
of departments we wish to emulate.
2
EPS has 21 FTE, but Physics has only 19.5, and AMS has only 9 at this time but is
slated to double eventually. Both Physics and AMS are currently less than half the size
of leading departments elsewhere.
11
The third and final way to broaden is by hiring new faculty within Astronomy.
Studies have shown3 that scientific excellence strongly correlates with department size
across all fields, and greater breadth is clearly the major reason. Our present allocation of
23 faculty FTE might seem large compared to UC Berkeley (17.5), Caltech (13), Harvard
(17), and Princeton (16), but our effective faculty size is actually considerably smaller, for
three reasons: (1) a large fraction of UCO faculty effort is directed to UC systemwide
astronomy, which limits the time and attention they can spend on Department tasks,
particularly on leadership roles; (2) two-thirds of the faculty are optical/infrared
observers, leaving only eight to cover all of theory and all of multi-wavelength
observations; and (3) of these eight, two are presently on leave in campus administration,
leaving only six active at this time, which is actually one fewer than at the last review.4
We therefore believe that the Department size is too small to mount a top-flight
program covering all the necessary bases, and we propose again, as we did last time, to
expand the faculty by adding four FTE. Two of these positions are already in the
Division hiring plan (shown in Appendix Ih), and two would be new. The extra
manpower would allow us to fill important gaps in the present theory program, as
described below, and also expand into one more wavelength regime, which we believe
should be some aspect of long-wavelength astronomy (i.e., far-infrared, submillimeter,
and radio). Four major new telescopes will open soon at these wavelengths that will be
vital for research in star, planet, and galaxy formation. Our programs in these areas will
be seriously incomplete without the ability to utilize these forefront data.
The Department vision, then, remains essentially the same as what it was at the
last External Review. We have made important progress towards many of the goals
stated there, and the research program overall has become broader, stronger, and better
integrated. However, the graduate and postdoctoral programs have emerged as needing
attention, and the Department continues to suffer from lack of adequate resources. These
points and others are discussed in more detail below.
2.3 Research, scholarship, and creative activity of the faculty
2.3.1 Highlights of the last review period: This section lists some notable achievements
during the last review period, illustrating areas of recent scientific excellence.
Research highlights:

The California-Carnegie Exoplanet team discovered the first sub-Saturn and
Neptune-mass planets. Transit data were analyzed to discover a rocky core in the
Saturn-mass companion to HD 149026, which provides a major clue to modes of
giant- planet accretion. The high gravitational sensitivity of multi-planet systems
E.g., Ehrenberg, R. G., and Hurst, P. J. 1998, “The 1995 Ratings of Doctoral Programs:
A Hedonic Model,” The Economics of Education Review, 17(2): 137-148.
4
Numbers of Department and UCO faculty are given in Table 3. The above sentence
refers to the number of effective Department faculty, which is defined in Table 3.
3
12
was exploited to find the first very small planet, a 7.5 Earth-mass object orbiting
GJ 876. Two team leaders are UCSC faculty (Vogt and Laughlin), and three
have UCSC PhDs (Laughlin, Marcy, and Fischer). This team has discovered 65%
of all ~200 exoplanets known.

Thorsett and collaborators confirmed a white dwarf companion to the pulsar
B1620-26, which led to the discovery of the so-called “Methuselah planet” as a
second orbiting companion.

More realistic models of giant-planet accretion by Bodenheimer and Fortney
indicate that young jupiters will be 10-100 times fainter than previously thought.
This has major implications for direct planet discovery programs.

Lin and collaborator Ida developed Lin’s now-classic planet-migration theory to
predict where planets of various mass and composition will be found in extrasolar
planetary systems. They suggested that the mass vs. orbital radius plot will
become the “color-magnitude diagram” of planet formation, providing the
standard test of new theories.

The Bay Area Computational Astrophysics Consortium led by Woosley won a
$9.5 million DOE SciDAC grant to model supernovae and gamma-ray bursts.
Meanwhile, Woosley’s “collapsar” model of black holes forming in the heart of
supernovae explosions emerged as the leading candidate for long/soft gamma-ray
bursts.

Ramirez-Ruiz and collaborators found that the temporal behavior of seemingly
different kinds of gamma-ray burst afterglows are in fact all well described by
relativistic blast-wave models.

Guhathakurta and collaborators found stars in our neighbor galaxy M31
(Andromeda) that extend to out half a million light years from the center. If we
could see all of Andromeda with the naked eye, it would look twice as large as the
Big Dipper.

The SAGES globular cluster survey led by Brodie and graduate student Jay
Strader proved the existence once and for all of two populations of globular
clusters—metal-poor ones formed in small proto-galaxies, and metal-rich ones
formed later in the buildup of massive galaxies. Smith traced chemical
inhomogeneities in globular cluster stars all the way down to the main sequence.

Rockosi was appointed PI of the SEGUE survey, a major follow-on to the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey that will document the kinematic structure of our Galaxy.
Two hundred forty thousand stellar spectra and radial velocities were collected
and are being analyzed.
13

Max, Madau, and colleagues embarked on a study of black hole mergers in
colliding galaxies; first results appeared as back-to-back papers in the June 29,
2007, issue of Science. Madau’s paper showed that the black holes from each
merging galaxy form an eccentric binary in the central disk in less than 1 million
years as a result of the gravitational drag from the gas rather than from the stars.
Max’s paper used Keck adaptive optics to locate the exact positions of the two
black holes in a pair of colliding galaxies and to characterize their position
relative to the disks of gas and stars.

The Via Lactea N-body simulation by Madau and Hubble Fellow Juerg Diemand
produced the highest-resolution N-body model yet of the gravitational formation
of the Milky Way’s dark-matter halo. Ten thousand sub-halos down to 106 solar
masses were identified, an order-of-magnitude more than in previous simulations.

Prochaska and graduate student Gabriel Prochter discovered four times more
foreground galaxies toward gamma-ray bursts than toward quasars, a totally
unexpected result that remains unexplained.

In the realm of distant galaxies, the ACS team on Hubble (Illingworth Co-PI)
probed galaxy formation to unprecedented high redshifts and detected a large rise
in the number of galaxies only 700 million years after the Big Bang. Faber,
Guhathakurta, and Koo (with Davis from UCB) conducted the DEEP2 survey of
50,000 galaxies that probed 9 billion years back in time using the new DEIMOS
spectrograph at Keck. DEEP2 spawned AEGIS, the most extensive multiwavelength survey of galaxies thus far. First results from AEGIS were featured in
the May 15, 2007, issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters and in the Hubble
Review 2006 yearbook.
Educational programs and human resources:

The number of Astronomy graduate students increased from 26 to 38. Three
Astronomy grads and two Physics grads won premiere Hubble Fellowships.

The Physics/Astrophysics undergraduate major grew from 10 to 51 students.
Forty per cent of all Physics majors are now choosing the Astrophysics track.

CfAO launched instrumentation-training programs for both grads and undergrads.

The number of female faculty increased from two to four (and will grow further to
five in 2007-8). We hired our first Hispanic faculty member. Female graduate
students now comprise nearly half the grad student population.
14

CfAO Education and Human Resource program: Many faculty and two-thirds of
all Astronomy graduate students participated in this program. The program has
two thrusts: to help provide UCSC science and engineering graduate students with
the teaching skills needed for their role as future faculty members, and to exercise
these teaching skills in outreach activities aimed at local community-college
science and engineering majors from under-represented groups. The program is
widely acknowledged as one of the very top NSF STC education activities.
Under current plans, a new UCSC-based “Institute for Scientist and Engineer
Educators” (ISEE) will take over these activities in 2009. Outreach to minorityserving community colleges in Hawaii is planned to continue under external
funding. Funds are being sought for outreach to local community colleges in the
Santa Cruz-Watsonville-Salinas area, serving heavily Hispanic students.
Instrumentation and facilities:

Woosley led a partnership of faculty from Astronomy, Physics, EPS, and AMS
that won a $1.1 M grant to bring UCSC’s first large mini-supercomputer to
campus (Pleiades). Woosley, Madau (and Primack from Physics) were granted
privileged early access to NASA Ames Columbia supercomputer, and Woosley
and Madau were granted a total of 5.5 million CPU hours through DOE’s INCITE
program.

Astronomy faculty advised on several space observatories. Thorsett was science
chair for the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array satellite (NUSTAR, since
cancelled) and is Interdisciplinary Scientist for GLAST. Illingworth is Co-PI for
the Advanced Camera for Surveys on Hubble. Woosley is a science advisor on
both HETE-2and NUSTAR. Lin served on the SIM and TPF-C science teams.

Highlights from the UCO and CfAO instrumentation labs: A new CCD mosaic
detector (by Vogt) gave the HIRES spectrograph on Keck the highest UV
efficiency of any high-resolution spectrograph in the world. The DEIMOS
spectrograph (by Faber) propelled Keck to the forefront of multi-object optical
spectroscopy. Vogt collaborated with Marcy at Berkeley to found the dedicated
2.4 m Automatic Planet Finder (APF) telescope on Mt. Hamilton. An outgrowth
of CfAO was a $9 million gift to found the Gordon and Betty Moore Laboratory
for Adaptive Optics on campus, which features the world’s most advanced
laboratory equipment for testing AO instrumentation. LAO staff pioneered the
first regular laser-guide-star AO system at Mt. Hamilton and assisted in installing
a similar system at Keck. Nelson developed technology for the next round of
giant ground-based optical telescopes, which spawned the Thirty-Meter Telescope
project in collaboration with Caltech and Canada.
Leadership and service:

Lin was appointed founding director of the newest Kavli Institute, for Theoretical
Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University.
15

Illingworth was founding chair of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory
Committee and guided that group to becoming one of the most respected
astronomy advisory bodies in Washington.

Miller and Bolte served as directors of UCO, and Nelson and Max served as
directors of CfAO. Guhathakurta served on the Science Advisory Panel for the
Thirty-Meter Telescope, and Miller and Bolte served on the TMT Board of
Directors and the CARA Board of Directors that oversees the Keck Observatory.

Faber served on the NRC panel recommending the Hubble refurbishment and on
EPP2010, which recommended the International Linear Collider. Smith joined
the editorial board of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Other faculty
served on a wide variety of advisory committees for NASA, NSF, DOE, and
public and private institutions.

Steve Thorsett serves as UCSC’s Dean of Physical and Biological Sciences, and
Bruce Margon is Vice Chancellor for Research. George Blumenthal was Chair
and Vice Chair of the UC systemwide Academic Senate for two years and stepped
in last fall to become Interim UCSC Chancellor.
The above activities prompted considerable media coverage, including several
articles on exoplanet discoveries by Vogt and Laughlin; press coverage on Hubble’s
Advanced Camera for Surveys and its work; the DEEP2, AEGIS, and First Galaxies
surveys; the size of M31’s halo; discoveries made with the Keck laser guide star AO
system; and Prochaska’s gamma-ray galaxy counts, Woosley and Faber were filmed in
two PBS documentaries.
Information on faculty interests is given in bios in Appendix Ia, including brief
sketches for astrophysics faculty in other departments.
This information is also
summarized in Table 1, which tabulates faculty by scientific area. It is seen that coverage
in all three chosen science excellence areas is fairly good, but strengths in theory vs.
observation do not always match. For example, many of our optical-infrared observers
work on galaxy evolution, but the corresponding number of theorists is small. A degree
of mismatch between the research interests of observers and theorists is historical at
UCSC, to the detriment of close collaborations. New faculty Fortney and Krumholz have
interests that overlap those of many observers, and we expect that their coming will help
to knit the two groups more closely together. An important goal of future hires is to
further strengthen connections between observers and theorists.
16
Table 1: Manpower distribution of astrophysics faculty by expertise and science area. Units are
FTE. Includes administrators, recent hires, and affiliated faculty in other departments.
2.3.2 Measures of quality: The 1993 NRC survey of graduate departments rated UCSC
Astronomy as number six in the country in terms of research excellence and number four
in terms of graduate-training effectiveness. Details from this survey are presented in
Appendices IVa1.D and IVa2.D. The next NRC rankings are not expected until Fall
2007. In the meantime, we believe that the most appropriate measure of faculty quality is
citations per paper, commonly called the “impact factor.” Table 2 presents a summary of
six impact-factor studies of space science departments since 1995 based on the citations
tabulated by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). Strikingly, only two
institutions, Princeton and UCSC, appear as top-rated departments in all six studies, and
their average positions are similar, with Princeton perhaps an eyelash ahead. We note
that UCSC has achieved this level of excellence without the major institutional
partnerships that other leading departments enjoy. The last line of Table 2 lists rankings
for the UCSC Physics department, which emerged as #1 in impact factor among all US
physics departments in the latest survey.
A second measure of quality is external awards and prizes. During the last review
period, junior faculty Laughlin and Prochaska won NSF Career grants and Rockosi won a
Packard Fellowship. Junior faculty Ramirez-Ruiz was appointed a lifetime Bahcall
Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies. Woosley won the Bethe and Rossi Prizes of
the American Physical and American Astronomical Societies. Miller was the fifth
lifetime recipient of the UC President’s Certificate of Excellence in recognition of his
outstanding service to the UC System as UCO director. He also received the Berkeley
17
Medal, the highest award of UC Berkeley.5 Max received the Department of Energy’s E.
O. Lawrence Award for her role in inventing laser-guide-star adaptive optics. Madau
was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in
Garching. Faber received the Centennial Medal of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of
Harvard University and was elected to the Harvard Board of Overseers. Vogt was a
World Technology Award Finalist for his achievement in astronomical spectrograph
design and received both the Tinsley Prize and the Carl Sagan Memorial Award of the
American Astronomical Society for his contributions to the California-Carnegie
Exoplanet team.
Table 2: Rank order in terms of average citations per paper by leading astronomy departments,
based on data in the Science Citation Index.
Max, Lin, Miller, and Woosley were elected to the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, bringing the UCSC Astronomy total to five. Woosley was elected to the
National Academy of Sciences, bringing the UCSC Astronomy total to three. Faber was
elected to the American Philosophical Society.
In sum, based on quantitative measures as well as peer recognition, UCSC
astronomy faculty rank highly. Our junior faculty hired during the last review period—
Laughlin, Prochaska, Rockosi, Ramirez-Ruiz, Fortney, and Krumholz—promise to
maintain and even advance this standard of excellence.
5
Previous recipients of the Berkeley Medal were Herman Wouk, Francois Mitterrand,
Glenn Seaborg, Gordon Moore, and Bill Clinton.
18
2.3.3 The context for planning: This section summarizes the various trends that set the
context for our planning, in astronomy as a whole and at UCSC. Our three areas of
science excellence remain cosmology and galaxy formation, high-energy astrophysics,
and star/planet/solar-system formation. We foresee that all three areas will remain strong
for the next decade and beyond, with star/planet/solar-system research growing the fastest
due to spectacular instrumentation advances and faster high-performance computing.
This is purposefully the area where our two newest faculty members (Fortney and
Krumholz) were chosen.
Five major new observatories are scheduled to open in the next ten years, and
four of them are in long-wavelength astronomy. The earliest is the Gamma-Ray Large
Area Telescope (GLAST), a gamma-ray satellite observatory due to be launched in
January 2008 by NASA. GLAST was conceived in the UCSC Physics department and is
understood here technically better than anywhere else. A goal of the next review period
is to partner with Physics to help them skim the scientific cream from GLAST. The
GLAST gamma-ray partnership is the first of our strategies to extend the Astronomy
program into non-optical wavelength regimes.
The Herschel infrared satellite will be the largest space telescope of its kind when
launched, in 2008. Herschel's 3.5-metre diameter mirror will collect long-wavelength
infrared radiation from some of the coolest and objects in the Universe, such as forming
stars and distant galaxies. Herschel will be the only space observatory to cover the
spectral range from far-infrared to submillimeter wavelengths.
The third telescope is NSF’s Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a large
ground-based submillimeter/radio interferometer in Chile that will open fantastic new
sensitivity and resolution windows on star formation in our own and distant galaxies,
starting in 2012. ALMA is NSF’s most awaited telescope of the last thirty years. We
need to engage with it, yet our present faculty lack the specialized interferometry training
and expertise in molecular astrophysics to do so.
The Extended Very Large Array radio interferometer is due to come on line in
2012. It will have unprecedented sensitivity to study neutral hydrogen gas in distant
galaxies and map star-forming regions in our own and distant galaxies. These
capabilities are extremely important for our star, planet, and galaxy formation programs,
but, as with ALMA, specialized interferometry training is needed.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is an infrared follow-on to the Hubble
Space Telescope that is due to launch in 2015. Our faculty are well positioned to use the
near-infrared instruments on JWST but are not as familiar with the science at longer
wavelengths (5-27 ), where sensitivity gains of a factor of 100 will permit detailed
studies of dust and ice grains formed during planet formation and in high-redshift
galaxies.
The Department also has footholds in several smaller missions, including the
Kepler and COROT satellites for detecting extra-solar planet transits; Sofia, an aircraft-
19
based infra-red telescope relevant to star formation; and the NUSTAR high-energy X-ray
satellite. Thorsett has especially close ties with NUSTAR; it is not presently on NASA’s
manifest but may be revived.
Several other facilities are looming whose construction is not yet certain. Pivotal
is the Thirty-Meter Telescope (TMT), a billion-dollar, next-generation ground-based
optical/infrared telescope conceived at UCSC under the technical leadership of Jerry
Nelson. The TMT incorporates adaptive optics from the start and, if successful, will
achieve a resolution that is ten times sharper than Hubble. The resulting impact on all of
our star, planet, and galaxy programs will be huge. The TMT partnership currently
includes UC, Caltech, and Canada, with additional partners being sought. The telescope
design is largely complete, and the project is looking for construction money. It is hoped
that much of TMT’s instrumentation will be built here at UCSC, with huge consequences
for the workloads of UCO faculty.
Other potential telescopes include the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST),
for which Physics is building the camera control system, and a not-yet-designated
“Beyond Einstein” satellite from NASA, which, depending on choice, might benefit
cosmology and/or high-energy astrophysics. Selection of the LISA gravity-wave satellite
for this slot could prompt us to consider hiring in GR and gravity-wave physics.
To summarize, with the prominent exception of long-wavelength observatories,
the present Astronomy faculty are well positioned to exploit major new astronomical
instrumentation expected in the next decade.
The chief long-term federal funding trend is an expected decline in NASA
deep-space missions if the Moon-Mars program remains in place. Grant funding for
cosmology and high-energy astrophysics at NASA will fall, and these areas will turn to
NSF, which is already highly oversubscribed. If DOE broadens its particle-astrophysics
program to fund more traditional astronomy (as recommended in EPP 2010), we could
exploit this by partnering with Physics, which has close DOE connections. To be safe,
we assume that federal funds will remain very tight, and we therefore plan on a muchexpanded development and outreach program, as described below.
Two technology breakthroughs also impact our plans. One is adaptive optics,
which is rapidly maturing in the near-infrared and is even migrating to optical
wavelengths (thanks to current work by LAO at Lick). The demise of Hubble near 2014
will catapult AO into the spotlight as the favored tool for super-sharp astronomical
imaging. Right now, we are leaders in the “Next Generation Adaptive Optics” program
at Keck, which will provide precision AO performance at infrared wavelengths and much
improved performance at optical wavelengths. On longer timescales, our AO expertise
will be a gateway into TMT, which depends on AO for its most spectacular gains. In
retrospect, the campus investment in CfAO has positioned us well to be leaders in this
new era.
20
The second development is the coming-of-age of supercomputers and their ability
(finally) to reliably simulate complex systems, such as turbulent fluids with radiative
transfer. This capacity is breaking open many classically intractable problems, with the
result that supercomputers are becoming as important to theorists as telescopes are to
observers. UCSC is well positioned to ride this trend by virtue of our many
computational astrophysics faculty and the new Pleiades mini-supercomputer. However,
supercomputers (and the facilities that house them) are short-lived and expensive, and
current funding paths do not have upgrade routes built in. Finding the resources to
house, run, and upgrade on-campus supercomputers is the major capital challenge
facing the Department in the next planning period.
UCSC expansion plans and priorities set the final context for planning. The
campus’ main goal is to enter the ranks of first-rate research universities. As one of the
better departments on campus, Astronomy is obligated to lead, and our multiple
partnerships with Physics, EPS, and AMS service this goal. UCSC is also seeking to
grow, from its present 15,000 students to 19,500 students by 2020 (this is presently
opposed by local governments). If growth is uniform, it would amount to 17% during the
next review period, which ought to bring us new FTE. A third UCSC priority is to
increase the size and quality of graduate programs, which we are working hard to
support. Finally, the University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) with NASA Ames
and the Silicon Valley Center in Mountain View are UCSC extensions to promote
research and teaching in the Silicon Valley. Participating in these organizations is a
fourth major goal.
2.3.4 Partner organizations: Besides our close partnerships with UCO and CfAO, our
other chief partnerships are with three sister UCSC departments:
Physics (http://physics.ucsc.edu): Collaborations between physicist Joel Primack
and Astronomy faculty go back to 1982. In 2000, Physics received four FTE designated
specifically for astrophysics.
Three of these have been filled, with a high-energy
observer (Smith), a GR and early-universe theorist (Aguirre), and a particle-astrophysicist
(Profumo). Physics also contains three particle theorists (Banks, Dine, and Haber), plus
an Organized Research Unit, the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP,
http://scipp.ucsc.edu), which builds particle detectors at leading accelerators. SCIPP also
conceived the GLAST gamma-ray satellite and built its detectors and is now working on
LSST. Joint collaborations between Astronomy and Physics include GLAST research
(Johnson, Primack, Ramirez-Ruiz, Thorsett, and Woosley), intergalactic metals in the
early Universe (Prochaska and Aguirre), dark-matter annihilation (Madau, Primack, and
Profumo), and galaxy formation (Primack and DEEP2). The two departments share
graduate students and jointly offer the undergraduate Physics/Astrophysics major
(ASPH). The budding partnership with Physics on GLAST is Astronomy’s first major
foray into non-optical/non-infrared observational astronomy.
Earth and Planetary Sciences (http://www.es.ucsc.edu): The name of this
department was recently changed to include the word “Planetary,” reflecting a broadened
interest in planets and solar-system formation. Three faculty specialize in rocky/icy
21
planets, comets, and asteroids (Glatzmaier, Asphaug, and Nimmo), which complements
Astronomy’s traditional strength in giant gaseous planets. Jointly, the two departments
sponsor the Center for the Origin and Development of Planets (CODEP,
http://codep.ucsc.edu), a local center within the Santa Cruz branch of UC’s systemwide
Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics (see below). When complete, CODEP
will have twenty-three affiliated faculty, including seven from Astronomy. CODEP
sponsors a weekly research seminar and hosts workshops on planetary science. However,
it is hampered by lack of funds and staff, and fund-raising to elevate CODEP’s activities
should be a joint priority for Astronomy and EPS.
Applied Math and Statistics (http://www.ams.ucsc.edu): This young department
was founded in 2001 with active assistance from astronomers. There are many potential
opportunities for collaboration, of which only astrophysical fluid dynamics is as yet
really active. Two AMS faculty work in this area, with interests in solar-system
formation (Garaud) and turbulence and solar magneto-hydrodynamics (Brummell); both
are CODEP members. As a group. the Applied Math faculty specialize in the theory and
applications of nonlinear differential equations, which have many potential applications
to astronomy, such as orbital dynamics and instrument control theory. The department is
also very strong in Bayesian statistics and data analysis. The department intends to
double in size from its present level of 9 FTE, offering further opportunities for
collaborations.
The Engineering School (http://www.soe.ucsc.edu): CfAO has joint projects
with the UCSC School of Engineering. Engineering professor Kubby is developing a
new generation of deformable AO mirrors based on MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical
systems). A new hire in control theory will provide key expertise for controlling such
mirrors and will add to an existing collaboration in this field (with Wiberg).
Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (http://igpp.ucsc.edu): The IGPP
is a multi-campus research unit of the University of California. The UCSC branch
consists of four research centers, one of which is CODEP. Six Astronomy faculty are
presently CODEP members, along with ten from EPS.
Off-campus, we have collaborations such as the DEEP2 and AEGIS galaxy
surveys with UC Berkeley, the California-Carnegie Planet Search with UC Berkeley and
Carnegie, and the SciDAC Computational Astrophysics Consortium in partnership with
nine other Bay Area institutions including UCB, Stanford, LLNL, and LBL. The Center
for Adaptive Optics collaborates with ten universities and nine national laboratories,
observatories, and institutes. CfAO and LAO are major participants in the Gemini Planet
Imager, a new adaptive optics instrument for the Gemini Observatory. Although we have
several smaller research collaborations with NASA Ames scientists, including heavy use
of their Columbia supercomputer, we have not yet managed to engage fully with the
University Affiliated Research Center (UARC). A joint computational astrophysics
center may provide an opening, and discussions are under way.
22
2.3.5 Extramural grant funding; overhead income: Extramural grants since 2001-2
are listed individually in Appendix Ib.1, and totals versus time are summarized in
Appendix Ib.2. Annual totals hover around $10 M per year but fluctuate owing to the
coming and going of a few multi-million-dollar grants, most of which are instrumentation
or facilities grants to UCO. Column 5 in Appendix Ib.2 attempts to correct for this by
subtracting off grants for CfAO, the Moore Laboratory for Adaptive Optics, and the APF
telescope. If these are excluded, an average rise of 50% occurred in “PI-only” research
grants from 2001 to 2006. Corrected for inflation, this reflects a rise in science-grant
productivity per faculty member of 20% during this period. Reasons for this are the
success of a few large projects toward the end of the period, recent large computer
purchases by Department faculty, and a cluster of faculty entering their peak productive
years. However, given the faculty age distribution now and in future (see Figure 1
below) plus expected tighter grant competition at NASA and NSF, it is unlikely that
productivity gains will continue at the same pace in future. More likely, the PI-grantwinning capacities of our faculty are close to saturation, and the only way to raise more
funds will be to add more faculty or apply for larger projects. The two are linked, as
more faculty would generate the extra power needed for planning and promoting large
projects.
In contrast to total grants, overhead return remained substantially constant over
the period, hovering near $1.4 M in total, and $1.0 M when CfAO overhead is subtracted.
CfAO has been the largest single source of overhead, but this will end when NSF funds
sunset in November 2009. CfAO highlights the importance of major federal centers for
generating steady, reliable overhead, as private donations, though often large in dollars,
usually do not carry overhead.
In closing this section, we would like to comment on UC’s policy for distributing
overhead income, which, in our opinion, allocates too much overhead to the university’s
operating budget rather than plowing it back into new initiatives. To illustrate, in 2005,
Department scientists alone generated $578 K in overhead, yet the Department budget in
the following year received only ~ $12 K in opportunity funds, a paltry return of only
2.1% (counting UCO grants, the return is even lower). This policy of low overhead
return deprives department chairs of discretionary money, which weakens their
leadership, and it motivates faculty to focus on individual PI grants rather than pool their
efforts to create something bigger. As state funds shrink, UC needs to inspire and
encourage faculty to search out new resources, but the present overhead policy does not
accomplish this.
2.3.6 Faculty size: The official roster of Astronomy ladder-rank faculty since 1998-99 is
given in Appendix IVb.D. However, since this table does not reflect administrative and
other leaves, we have also prepared Table 3, which shows the effective number of faculty
available to serve each year (ignoring sabbaticals). Two versions are shown, one that
counts Bodenheimer as a 0.2 UCO FTE and one (with numbers in parentheses) that
counts him as a Department member; the latter reflects his real role. Numerically our
faculty are dominated by UCO, but in terms of campus FTE, the resources reside in the
Department. In June 2007, we had 23 faculty but only 8.6 campus FTE officially
23
allocated to academic instruction (9.4 FTE, depending on Bodenheimer). Table 3 also
projects forward through 2010-11 to include two retirements (Bodenheimer and Mathews
in June this year), three faculty who have been hired but are yet to arrive (Bernstein,
Fortney, and Krumholz), and the two expansion FTEs that are already in the Divisional
plan. Further retirements are not foreseen within this period, but some (in UCO) are
expected soon after that.
Table 3 shows that the effective number of Department faculty overall has
remained quite flat since the last review in 1999-2000. Next year it will actually be one
smaller than it was then. The proposed FTE expansion requested at the last External
Review therefore did not occur, and in fact we shrank. After next year, the table shows
us climbing out of the hole, with a net gain of 2 effective FTE by 2010-11. Remarkably,
this year’s number of 7 effective Department FTE is nearly the same as the 6.5 we had in
1975, despite a doubling of campus enrollments and a near-doubling of the graduate
program since then. Astronomy would like to participate in future campus growth
on, at the very least, a pro rata basis.
Table 3
Effective Number of Astronomy Ladder-Faculty FTE: History and Projections
Year
Department
UCO
Total
97-98
6 (7)
2.8 (2.6)
8.8 (9.6)
98-99
6 (7)
2.8 (2.6)
8.8 (9.6)
99-00
6 (7)
2.8 (2.6)
8.8 (9.6)
00-01
7 (8)
2.4 (2.2)
9.4 (10.2)
01-02
8 (9)
2.6 (2.4)
10.6 (11.4)
02-03
8 (9)
2.8 (2.6)
10.8 (11.6)
03-04
7 (8)
2.8 (2.6)
9.8 (10.6)
04-05
7 (8)
2.8 (2.6)
9.8 (10.6)
05-06
6 (7)
2.6 (2.4)
8.6 (9.4)
06-07
6 (7)
2.6 (2.4)
8.6 (9.4)
07-08
6
2.6
8.6
08-09
7
2.6
9.6
Projections assuming current Divisional hiring plan with 2 new FTE:
09-10
8
2.6
10.6
10-11
9
2.6
11.6
Explanation: “Effective” faculty does not count faculty who are serving as administrators or who
are on whole-year leave for Academic Senate service. Except for sabbaticals, this is the official
ladder manpower available to the Department. UCO faculty are officially counted as 0.2 FTE,
but their actual Department service is larger, and so the real totals are also larger. The numbers in
parentheses count Bodenheimer as a Department member rather than as a UCO member, which
was his real role; they are a truer guide to the real number of Department faculty. Projections
past 2008-2009 assume no new retirements but two new hires under the current Divisional plan.
24
2.3.7 Faculty recruitment, renewal, retention, and diversity: The last External Review
committee stressed the importance of successfully replacing the bulge of near-retirement
faculty that then existed, especially in the Department. Figure 1 shows three histograms
of faculty ages, in 2000 at the beginning of the review period, in January 2007 (this year),
and in January 2009, when all faculty now hired will have arrived. Altogether, we will
have added eight new faculty during the last review period, six junior and two senior, and
the mean age of Department faculty is now substantially lower. Another bulge of
retirements (in UCO) is expected to occur late in the next review period and soon after
(bottom panel).
The six newest junior appointments (Laughlin, Prochaska, Rockosi, RamirezRuiz, Fortney, and Krumholz) were our first choice in every case, demonstrating that
Santa Cruz can compete effectively for the best talent in the world despite handicaps of
low salaries and high housing costs. Among recent hires, Ramirez-Ruiz was a Target of
Excellence appointment, with expertise in high-energy astrophysics. Since arriving, he
has joined the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP) and the GLAST science
team and was just appointed a lifetime Bahcall Fellow at the Institute for Advanced
Studies. He is our first Hispanic faculty member. Jonathan Fortney holds a Spitzer
Fellowship at NASA Ames and is a leading theorist in planetary atmospheres. He
specializes in high-performance computing and has a foothold in numerous NASA
satellite missions. Mark Krumholz simultaneously holds Hubble, Lyman Spitzer, and
Princeton Council on Science and Technology fellowships at Princeton. He also
specializes in high-performance computing and brings outstanding theoretical strength in
the physics of star formation. Collectively, this group strengthens and broadens the
theoretical side of the Department while at the same time forging tighter ties with
Physics, Earth & Planetary Sciences, and Applied Math. Krumholz and Fortney overlap
especially well with observers. In addition to research excellence, additional criteria for
these hires were energy, vision, and the ability to nurture a close-knit, vibrant community
of scholars. These newest young faculty—and our previous recent hires—possess these
qualities in abundance.
The age histograms in Figure 1 show that our program of Department faculty
renewal is proceeding successfully, which was the most important challenge singled out
by the previous External Review committee. Indeed, with future hires we are in danger
of developing another bulge, of youthful faculty. To avoid this and to provide leadership
continuity in the face of retirements near the end of the next review period, it is important
that one of the future theorist appointments be made at a senior level.
The diversity of Astronomy faculty has been steadily growing. Rebecca
Bernstein’s appointment in UCO next year will bring the number of female faculty to 5
(out of 23). As noted, Ramirez-Ruiz is our first Hispanic. We were disappointed that our
most recent search in 2006-7 did not yield more female applicants, but the advertised
positions were in theory, where the number of women scientists is small relative to
observational astronomy.
25
Figure 1: Faculty age histograms at the time of the last External Review (January 2000), this review
(January 2007), and in January 2009, when all faculty now hired will have arrived. Faculty presently
serving as administrators are not included. The projection to 2009 assumes no retirements and no new
hires beyond the two in the present Divisional plan.
26
Near the time of the last review, two faculty departed for other positions. Dennis
Zaritsky left for Arizona in 2000-1, enticed away by a double spousal hire. Lars
Hernquist was lured away by Harvard the year before that, attracted by higher salary,
better computing (then), and better spousal job opportunities. The departure rate is not
high but alerts us to the fact that excellent faculty are always targets for outside offers.
Four elements are crucial in retention: (1) adequate starting salaries and housing
assistance to assure that young families attain a decent quality of life in their early years;
(2) first-class facilities, which means telescopes and instruments for observers and highspeed computers for theorists; (3) first-class graduate students and postdocs to work
with; and (4) effective mentoring during the early years to make sure that faculty
integrate fully into the community. The Department can provide (3) and (4) but must rely
on UC for most of (1) and (2). The announced UC salary raise of 26% over the next four
years will help, and we urge that it be targeted preferentially to young and mid-range
faculty. In addition, UCSC must be more accommodating to the career needs of spouses,
both with respect to better advising on local opportunities and also making new positions
for spouses available. This may be especially important in attracting female faculty.
2.3.8 Faculty mentoring: Our program of faculty mentoring has increased in intensity.
The Chair meets informally but frequently with new faculty to advise on which courses to
teach, the balance between research and service, and applications for external grants and
fellowships. Making sure that young faculty are nominated for early-career prizes is a
major responsibility. The purpose of mentoring is not only to make our junior faculty
successful but also to make them feel that they have found a scientific home at UCSC. A
faculty handbook is being written to orient new faculty.
2.3.9 Faculty workload: The Department instructional load policy for ladder faculty is
shown in Appendix Ie. We require each UCO faculty to teach one 5-unit/one-quarter
course per year and each Department faculty to teach two 5-unit/one-quarter courses.
These requirements are strictly enforced except for sabbaticals, Academic Senate service,
administrative leaves, and the rare course buyout. Seminars are not substituted for
regular courses.
Student FTE versus time at both graduate and undergraduate levels are shown in
Appendix IVd.D, and individual course enrollments are shown in Appendix VI.a (to
convert student FTE to student course quarters, multiply by roughly 9). Total
enrollments have grown by 30% since the last review in 1999-2000, and by 50%
over the last decade; increases for undergraduates are 50% larger than for graduates.
The workload ratio is defined as the ratio of student FTE taught per total budgeted
faculty, including adjuncts and lecturers (see definitions of these quantities in Appendix
IVg.D). This also increased, by 20% during the review period, and by 30% over the last
decade. The latest value given (in 2005-6) is 10% higher than the mean of the PBSci
Division and is 24% above the campus average. This larger-than-average workload ratio
reflects the fact that Astronomy enrollments are dominated by large introductory courses
for non-scientists, which many students use to satisfy the campus general education “Q”
(quantitative) requirement. Because of this, we expect that our total enrollments will
grow along with the UCSC student body, which is projected to increase by 30% by 2020,
27
or 17% during the next review period. Applied to our present official allotment of 8.6
academic FTE (see Table 3), we would expect an additional 1.5 FTE based on enrollment
alone.
Appendix IVe.D tabulates the number of courses and students taught each year by
active ladder faculty, not counting faculty who are on leave, in administration, or on
sabbatical. These measures have remained substantially flat during the review period,
with Astronomy’s enrollments per active faculty averaging about 20% higher than the
PBSci Division average because of our large introductory courses.
2.3.10 Entrepreneurial efforts: Entrepreneurial efforts are mentioned throughout this
document; major ones are collected here for convenience. As noted, the new
undergraduate Physics/Astrophysics (ASPH) major grew from 10 to 51 students over the
last five years, and the number of registered graduate students grew by nearly 50%. We
hired eight excellent new faculty, six of them junior, three of them women, one of them
Hispanic, and deepened expertise in all three of our chosen science areas. The Center for
Adaptive Optics evolved into one of the most highly regarded NSF Science and
Technology Centers, and its education programs have involved participation by a large
fraction of Astronomy graduate students. We strengthened ties with EPS and AMS by
co-founding the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics and the Center for the
Development and Evolution of Planets (CODEP) in 1999-2000 and partnered with them
and with Physics to bring UCSC’s first large mini-supercomputer to campus (Pleiades).
Ties with Physics strengthened as we helped them hire and retain excellent astrophysics
faculty and began to nurture the joint scientific collaboration with GLAST.
Scientifically, we founded and now lead at least seven major research
collaborations, including the California-Carnegie Extrasolar Planet Search, the First
Galaxies survey, the DEEP2 and AEGIS galaxy surveys, the SAGES globular cluster
survey, the SciDAC Computational Astrophysics Consortium for supernovae explosions,
and the SEGUE survey on the structure and kinematics of our Galaxy. Noteworthy are
several recent telescope and instrumentation projects, such as the Moore Laboratory for
Adaptive Optics, the DEIMOS spectrograph at Keck, the Automated Planet-Finder
Telescope under construction at Mt. Hamilton, and the Thirty Meter Telescope project,
which promises to revolutionize the course of optical astronomy by pioneering groundbased telescopes with ten times the angular resolution of Hubble.
A major thrust for the future is fund-raising and development. Toward that end,
we have begun to research opportunities for a major federal research center, in
partnership with other UCSC departments and with other northern California institutions.
We have developed a large list of potential private donors and have started to cultivate
them with activities such as the Halliday Public Lecture, tours at Keck Observatory, and
events on Mt. Hamilton. Major funding proposals were submitted to the Campus
Comprehensive Campaign and are described under New Initiatives below. The
Astronomy units will have our first full-time development assistant starting next year,
paid for 50% by UCO and 50% by the campus.
28
2.3.11 Goals for the research program: We close this section with a list of goals for
the faculty and research program for the next review period:





Maintain and expand recent gains in high-performance computing.
Open a research program in long-wavelength astronomy.
Create at least one major new research center and find support for it.
Strengthen research ties between Department and Observatory faculty.
Strengthen collaborations with Physics, EPS, AMS, and CODEP.
2.4 Objectives, overall quality, and direction of the graduate program
The graduate program began with the founding of the Astronomy department in 1966; the
first PhD was graduated in 1971. The goal of the graduate program is to educate PhDs
who will go on to become research astronomers; masters degrees are awarded only to
PhD students who request them and to qualified students who leave or are dismissed from
the program. Since 1994, only 8 out of 48 graduating PhDs are no longer in astronomy
research institutions.
The list of PhDs graduating since 1994-5 is given in Appendix IId, including
thesis titles, advisors, the positions they took upon leaving UCSC, any prize fellowships
they received, and their present positions. A list of all PhDs in the history of the program
and their present employment is at http://www.astro.ucsc.edu/graduate/alumni.html.
General information on the graduate program is given in the UCSC course catalog at
http://reg.ucsc.edu/catalog/html/programs_courses/astrPS.htm (see also Appendix IIb).
Information for new graduate students (the graduate student handbook) is at
http://www.astro.ucsc.edu/graduate/newgrad.html (see also Appendix IIa). The degree
requirements governing each entering class are stated in the UCSC catalog for the fall of
that year; this year’s requirements are at http://www.astro.ucsc.edu/graduate/degree.html.
Graduate courses are listed at http://www.astro.ucsc.edu/courses/index.html. Course
descriptions may be found at http://www.astro.ucsc.edu/courses/graddesc.html, and
course syllabi are at http://www.astro.ucsc.edu/courses/gradcoursewebpages.html (see
also Appendix IIc). Graduate student profiles are at
http://www.astro.ucsc.edu/graduate/gradresearch.html, and their individual websites are
linked through the directory listings at http://natsci2.ucsc.edu/lastro/default.html.
Graduate student enrollments and instructors for individual courses going back several
years are in Appendix VIa, a summary of all grad course enrollments is in IVc.D, and the
number of graduate FTE versus time is summarized in Appendix IVd.D.
2.4.1 Graduate enrollments; time to degree: Individual degrees conferred and thesis
titles are given in Appendix IVa.G, and conferred degree totals and enrolled graduate
students by year are given in Appendix IVb.G. Since some of the latter quantities are
complicated (see definitions in Appendix IVg.D), we also plot in Figure 2 the number of
enrolled graduate students in each Fall quarter based on Department records. Student
numbers fell in 2001-2003 due to small incoming classes near those years (see Figure 3)
but then recovered. Altogether, the number of enrolled PhD students grew by 50%
during the review period (1999-2000 to present).
29
Proj.
Figure 2: Number of enrolled Astronomy PhD students in each Fall quarter, from Department
records. Data for Fall 2007-8 are projected.
Incoming graduate class sizes and later withdrawals are shown in Figure 3. The
number of acceptances fluctuates strongly due to random statistics. About fifteen percent
of students withdraw without completing the PhD (red bars). Half of these leave because
they do not like doing research or do poorly at it; the other half leave for other PhD
programs, usually not in astronomy but in some related field. For a target number of 40
students and a 15% dropout rate, we should accept 7.6 new students per year in steady
state. The average over the last four years is nearly that.
Figure 3: Incoming graduate class sizes by year. Students who withdrew are shown in red. This
statistic is potentially incomplete for years 2003 and later.
30
The interests of our graduate students are heavily weighted toward opticalinfrared observations, with only 25% presently in theory. A major goal is to attract more
and better theory students by advertising our excellent theory faculty (including the three
new theorists Ramirez-Ruiz, Fortney, and Krumholz) and our growing ties with theorists
in Physics, AMS, and EPS. A coordinated outreach effort to advertise theory in all four
departments is due to start in Fall 2007.
Recent PhD recipients are listed in Appendix IVa.G, and total degrees conferred
by year are given in Appendix IVb.G. The rate of PhD production has been low lately,
but this is due to the small number of students entering the program 5-6 years ago. It will
increase markedly when the large classes of 2003 and 2004 complete their degrees.
Figure 4 shows the distribution of times to degree for all students receiving
degrees in 1996 and later. Each bin shows the number graduating from year X to year
X+1 in the program. Assuming that the distribution within each year is flat (as records
show), the median time to degree is 5.7 years. This number is slightly less than the
average time to degree at the last External Review, which was given as six years. The
External Review committee thought this was too long, and our faculty and graduate
students have been discussing this question. Our feeling is that the recent proliferation of
prize postdoctoral fellowships has changed the situation. (A “prize” fellowship is one
that permits the incumbent to work on any project they choose, in contrast to the
traditional postdoc, who works under the direction of a faculty PI.) The number of such
fellowships has grown to the extent that all excellent students should expect to win one
directly after the PhD. The quality of this first fellowship has therefore become a key
barometer that determines the whole course of a student’s career, and landing one early is
key. We need to groom our students better to meet this milestone, and for some students,
taking an extra year in grad school to firm up research, publish more papers, and attend
conferences is more beneficial than imposing an arbitrary time limit. Indeed, some
departments are granting degrees early but keeping their students on for an extra
postdoctoral year, which effectively disguises the real time to degree. In view of the
intense competition, six years for some students is not excessive, if well used.
That said, there are many students beyond six years in Figure 4 who should not be
there, and we intend to try hard to reduce these outcomes through better tracking and
incentives. Impediments to student progress are being analyzed, and a report will be
ready for the External Review committee next year.
2.4.2 Measures of quality: Our graduate students are among the best at UCSC and are
very good by the standards of top-flight departments. Data on the career outcomes of
PhD students since 1994 are given in Appendix IId. Among the 42 PhDs graduating
from 1996-7 to 2006-7, we had four Hubble Fellows from Astronomy and two from
Physics. There were two Chandra Fellows, two IAS Fellows, five Carnegie Fellows, six
NSF Fellows, and a total of 28 prize fellowships overall. Nevertheless, there is some
cause for concern. An analysis of first positions gained by our students shows that only
25% landed highly prestigious prize fellowships straight out of graduate school, whereas
we think 50% would be a more appropriate goal. Moreover, few UCSC graduates are
31
winning permanent ladder-faculty appointments at the most elite institutions. Among the
26 PhDs who graduated in 1994-5 to 1999-00, seven are now professors at second-tier
universities but only two are at first-rank institutions (Arizona and Carnegie). By some
indicators, then, our graduates are doing well but not superbly. To improve, we need to
attract better students and mentor and inspire them more effectively.
Figure 4: Years to PhD degree for all students who received degrees in years 1995-6 to 2006-7.
2.4.3 Graduate recruiting: Data on graduate student applicants are given in Appendix
Vb. Averaged over the past four years, we have had ~130 applicants per year and made
~20 offers of full support, of whom 7-8 students elected to come. This number is about
right to maintain the size of the program at its current level, but dipping deeper into the
applicant pool would mean an unacceptable sacrifice in quality. Separately, we have
done a won-lost analysis of our success in attracting graduate students in competition
with other departments. In head-to-head matches during 2001-6, we lost 70% of the time
against UCB and Caltech but were even with Princeton, Harvard, Arizona, and Chicago.
Against all other departments we were overwhelmingly successful, winning nearly 90%
of the time. Some of the numbers are small and the applicant pool is weighted towards
students who are already predisposed to think we are good. Nevertheless, the numbers
are encouraging. The most-often stated reason for students’ going elsewhere is access to
a broader research menu than we offer. A second reason is greater access to large
telescopes (Caltech). A third but less important reason is better financial support.
Another factor adversely affecting quality is the small number of international
applicants, who tend to be better trained in theory than US students (international
enrollees are shown in Appendix Vb). UC fee policies have made it almost impossible
to support international students from faculty grants. The situation has improved
32
somewhat recently, but pressure needs to be kept on the UC administration to remove all
barriers. We are contemplating more imaginative ways to attract international students,
such as creative combinations of TAs and GSRs to support international students,
endowed fellowships targeted for international students, and partnering with overseas
institutes. An aggressive international component will be part of the graduate advertising
campaign this fall.
2.4.4 Graduate diversity: Diversity data on graduate students are presented in
Appendix IVc.G. Our population reflects the ethnic and gender makeup of US
astronomy and physics undergraduates, which means that we have few minority students
but many women. The percentage of women graduate students in our program has been
growing since the past review and now stands at almost 50%. Special funding for
international students would allow us to further improve diversity by admitting students
from Mexico and Latin America. CfAO outreach programs to nearby community
colleges with high minority enrollments have begun to pay off in successful graduate
student recruitment, though to date these have been in the Engineering School rather than
Astronomy. The new Institute of Scientist and Engineer Educators (ISEE) at UCSC will
continue this outreach at local Hispanic-serving community colleges.
2.4.5 Path to degree, graduate student support: Graduate students take two years of
courses (three per quarter) and must complete at least one research project during the first
two years (the First Year Project). After passing a comprehensive Board Review that
includes a two-part written Preliminary Exam, review of course evaluations, and
performance in research, students look for thesis advisors during their third year with the
strongly stated goal of taking the thesis Qualifying Exam and advancing to candidacy by
the end of the third year. In practice, this goal is rarely met, and most students take the
exam during the fourth or even fifth year. A strong goal is to accelerate this exam.
Full financial support is available for all qualified graduate students. Support data
in Appendix Va show that roughly 60% comes from faculty grants, 25% comes from
various internal and external fellowships, and TAships account for the remaining 15%.
Grads are required to TA for at least one quarter, and one-third of them TA more than
that. Typical stipends are $25 K per year for first-year students, rising to $28 K per year
in the last years of the thesis. All GSRs are paid 100% time in summer.
First-year graduate students are supported purely on TAs and fellowships, which
permits them in principle to choose a First Year Project free of worry about finding a
faculty sponsor. In practice, however, projects typically continue into the summer and
the second year, at which point faculty support is needed. A major impediment has been
negotiating this transition, when students need support but have not yet found a
permanent thesis advisor. The Chair has no discretionary funds to solve this problem. A
suite of endowed second-year graduate fellowships is a high priority for fund-raising.
Innovative strategies to pool faculty support for second-year students are also being
considered, and suggestions from the External Review committee are welcome.
33
2.4.6 Graduate curriculum: Students are required to take a total of thirteen courses,
among which six are required: E&M, Physics of Astrophysics (A and B), Stellar
Evolution, Galaxies, and Introduction to Research. A wide array of other courses covers
stars, planets, high-energy astrophysics, galaxies, the interstellar medium, and
observational techniques and instrumentation, including adaptive optics. The current
curriculum reflects the interests and tastes of older faculty, several of whom are retiring
or are on leave. A redesign is planned for Fall 2008-9, when all junior faculty will have
arrived. Thirteen required courses is high compared to other graduate programs and may
reduce our students’ focus on research and extend the time to degree. We are considering
reducing the number of required courses, and the External Review committee’s
perspectives on this are welcome.
2.4.7 Graduate student research: Graduate students start research in their first year, and
the fact that they are fully supported at that time allows them to choose any project they
want. The faculty provide a list of possible research projects for incoming graduate
students each September. However, additional projects have sometimes been set as
requirements in subsequent coursework, so that students have started work on one project
only to see it interrupted by another. We have also been slow to recognize that these
early projects need to carry funding through the first summer and perhaps the second year
as well (see above). Recent discussions have highlighted these issues, and coordination
and funding is improving. However, we are still short of the ideal goal in which all
students should be free to choose their research topics without worries about faculty
funding. Graduate fellowships targeted for second-year students would ease this
problem.
2.4.8 Graduate advising, mentoring, and tracking: Each student has a graduate advisor
on the faculty. For all third-year and later students, the advisor is the research supervisor;
for first- and some second-year students, the advisor is a faculty member assigned to the
student on entry. We are now in the second year of a new regime in which each student
is required to meet with their advisor once a quarter, which is tracked by making the
advisor and student jointly fill out a questionnaire. This program has been more
successful in preventing students from falling through the cracks, but mentoring of shy
students, particularly in first and second years, is still uneven.
The Board Review at the end of the second year is a critical juncture when
students are judged worthy of going on to PhD research. We have recently instituted a
provisional pass system whereby marginal students are given one more year to find a
supervisor and a thesis topic. Specific milestones are set for these students, and they are
tracked more closely during the third year. The system is intended to provide a grace
period for students to re-examine their goals and make alternate plans outside of graduate
school, if necessary.
All first and second-year students have lengthy interviews with the Chair and the
Associate Chair following the Board Review to discuss their performance and highlight
issues they need to think about as they complete a thesis and enter the job market. These
include a review of personal strengths and weaknesses, the “toolkit” of skills that each
34
student wants to assemble before graduating, effective ways of presenting oneself at
conferences and informal gatherings, and strategies to establish a scientific network
beyond Santa Cruz in order to set up at least two external letters of recommendation.
Individual PhD advisors are also becoming much more aware of the need for these
things.
2.4.9 Graduate facilities: Astronomy graduate students need access to world-class
telescopes and high-performance computers, and access for most students is satisfactory
through their faculty advisors. A chronic problem is sub-standard computer support for
first- and second-year students, who must use the “Department network” rather than the
“UCO network” if they do not yet have a computer account through a faculty research
supervisor. This change was made in 2004 for budgetary reasons because UCO charges
were deemed to be too high. The main drawbacks of the new system are the lack of
certain software packages (such as DS9) on the Department network and the near-total
lack of expert computing consulting available to new students. The problem is one of
mismatched expectations—the UCSC campus computing budget, which funds the
Department network, provides a general level of computer support that is far lower than
the standards of other world-class astronomy departments. We have been working hard
to maximize the effectiveness of the meager campus allotment, and services have
improved. However, it appears that certain needs can only be supplied by the
Observatory, and the continuing free support that they provide, though small, is crucial.
2.4.10 Training of graduate students as future educators: At least three avenues are
available for imparting teaching skills to graduate students. First is the standard TA
route. The Head TA is a graduate student picked for special skills and interest in
teaching, whose duties include organizing a TA workshop for incoming grads. This
student also maintains a special website that gives advice on problems likely to be
encountered by new TAs. The performance of Astronomy TAs is monitored by reading
their TA student evaluations (responsibility of the Department Chair and the
Undergraduate Advisor) and by fielding occasional complaints from Astronomy faculty.
From this information, we know that Astronomy TAs overall receive high marks from
undergraduates. A second training route is the many required talks in courses and a
required talk to the Department on the First Year Project. These talks are generally
excellent; our students are good speakers. The third and most focused route is
participation in the unique science-teaching opportunities offered by the Center for
Adaptive Optics. These include an annual Professional Development program, which
introduces students to inquiry-based learning for science teaching, and the chance to put
these skills to work in outreach activities for science and engineering students at
community colleges in the Santa Cruz area and in Hawaii. Two-thirds of our graduate
students take advantage of one or more of these CfAO opportunities. These opportunities
will continue past 2009 via the Institute for Scientist and Engineer Educators (ISEE).
2.4.11 Astronomy graduate students in other departments: The Astronomy
Department interfaces with graduate students in two other departments. The interaction
with Physics is close—faculty supervise theses across department lines, and students are
free to choose advisors in either department. CfAO also hosts several Engineering
35
students doing technical projects. The existence of CODEP (Center for the Origin and
Development of External Planets) ought to create a similar shared community of graduate
students between Astronomy and EPS, but this has not yet fully matured, partly because
CODEP lacks the resources needed to mount community-building activities. A goal for
the future is to build CODEP into a more vibrant research community where graduate
students from Astronomy and EPS can meet and forge closer ties.
2.4.12 Recent innovations: Several innovations have been instituted lately to strengthen
the Department’s intellectual atmosphere, particularly with the aim of engaging graduate
students. Morning coffee is now well attended by students and postdocs (but only some
faculty!). Graduate students host the weekly colloquium speaker at lunch at the
University Center, and, to prepare for this, they lead a discussion of recent papers by the
speaker at Tuesday morning coffee. Grads can also serve as hosts for colloquium
visitors, and the Department subsidizes grad lunches and dinners with the speakers.
Grads also have a representative at faculty meetings except for confidential discussions of
promotions and hiring.
2.4.13 Academic proposals pending for the graduate program: Astronomy has no
new proposals pending.
2.4.14 Factors limiting the size of the graduate program: Four factors play a role in
setting the size of the graduate program. To compete with other world-class programs,
Astronomy needs to provide first-class research opportunities. One limit on the number
of grads is therefore faculty research dollars, not the number of Astronomy TAs (excess
TAs are now being filled by grads in Physics and EPS). From website data, it appears
that graduate student-to-faculty ratios in other leading astronomy departments cluster
near 1.7, with excursions up to 2.6. However, all departments at the high end have large
partner institutions to help them share the load (e.g., Harvard and the Smithsonian
Astrophysical Observatory). UCSC’s ratio of 1.7 is in good balance with the present
ability of our faculty to generate GSR support. Thus, increasing the size of the graduate
program requires more faculty.
A second factor is the absolute number of students. Our present number of 35-40
students is close to the largest departments elsewhere (Arizona, 45; Berkeley, 40;
Harvard, 50; Chicago, 40). By this metric, we could grow by perhaps 10-20% but not
much more.
A third factor is the quality of PhD applicants. As noted, we are currently
accepting all qualified applicants, so that increasing graduate numbers depends on
becoming more attractive. Our outreach efforts next fall will advertise more fully the
considerable assets we have, and broadening the research program through a longwavelength initiative would attract still more students. Conversely, if we fail to engage
effectively with long-wavelength astronomy, the number of qualified applicants might
actually decline.
36
The final factor is space. Increasing the number of students and faculty means
increasing the total personnel of the department in rough proportion, as postdocs and
other support personnel will have to keep pace. Do we have room to expand our total
offices by 10-20%? This is analyzed below, and the answer is a qualified yes, provided
that anticipated space opening up in the Center for Adaptive Optics is used for new
faculty and their affiliated students and postdocs.
2.4.15 Goals for the graduate program during the next review period: In view of the
above, our goals for the graduate program are as follows:








Attract and fund the most talented graduate students by advertising the program
more intensively, attracting more international students, and broadening and
enlarging the program with a new initiative in long-wavelength astronomy.
Increase the fraction of theory-oriented students.
Revamp the graduate curriculum to reflect the skills and interests of new faculty.
Expand the number of graduate students by 10-20%, all resources permitting.
Improve the research productivity of graduate students by better management of
pre-thesis projects and other strategies now under review.
Provide second-year students with flexible support options not tied to faculty
grants, preferably through endowed fellowships.
Curtail the number of students taking more than 6 years to the PhD degree by
instituting appropriate facilitating and motivating strategies.
Create a more cohesive graduate community between EPS and Astronomy for
students and faculty engaged in studying solar system and planet formation.
2.5 Objectives, overall quality, and direction of the postdoctoral program
2.5.1 Review of the program: The postdoctoral phase in astronomy has become a
critical career stage during which junior scientists solidify key competencies that are
difficult to create later in life, when other duties interfere. Since postdocs are still
learning, departments need to provide training and mentoring for them much as they do
for graduate students. However, by virtue of their added experience and knowledge,
postdocs have the extraordinary potential to contribute back to a department by helping
to teach and mentor younger students. Indeed, these activities should be an integral part
of the training opportunities we provide. The intense research focus of postdocs also
enables them to play a leading role in shaping a department’s intellectual community.
Finally, a talented pool of postdoctoral fellows adds luster to a department and is a
powerful magnet for attracting better postdocs and graduate students and retaining
excellent faculty.
The Astronomy Department has made important strides to better integrate our
postdocs into the intellectual fabric of our community, but we can and should go farther.
Our postdocs now have a designated representative at faculty meetings. A postdoc has
been added to the colloquium committee, and postdocs now sign up to host colloquium
speakers, as do faculty. They lead a weekly journal club and give at least one talk per
month in the Friday Lunchtime Astrophysics Seminar Hour (FLASH). Finally, postdocs
37
are invited to play a larger role in directing student research by supervising undergraduate
Senior Theses and graduate First Year Projects (under faculty oversight). These are all
fairly recent developments.
As of June 2007, the count of postdocs in Astronomy is 16, down slightly from 18
at the time of the last External Review (but there are now also five temporary junior
researchers with various appointments). Ten of the postdocs are male, and six are
female. However, 12 are employed on faculty research grants, while only four have prize
postdoctoral fellowships on non-PI grants (two Hubble Fellows, one NSF Fellow, and
one Swiss National Science Foundation Fellow). We have emphasized the important role
that prize postdoctoral fellowships have in setting a department’s intellectual tone, as the
freedom to design one’s own research agenda attracts a higher caliber of incumbent.
Thus, the relative paucity of prize postdoctoral fellows at UCSC is a concern. In fact, the
strongest criticism of the UCSC Astronomy by recent candidates for faculty jobs is the
lack of endowed departmental prize postdoctoral fellowships—we are the only leading
astronomy program without them. A further obstacle to observational postdocs per se
is UC’s systemwide policy that prevents postdocs (from any campus) from applying
directly for Keck time. Perhaps this policy should be revisited.
In view of the importance of postdocs, in our opinion a top priority for new
development funds is the creation of 3-6 UCSC endowed prize postdoctoral
fellowships. This number would enable the award of 1-2 such positions each year.
These fellowships would be a permanent feature of the program and must therefore be
supported mainly by campus funds. Ideally, they should be unrestricted as to field, but
some could be more targeted depending on the source of funds (e.g., as part of a new
computational astrophysics center). Raising the endowment for these postdocs is one
of two top-priority items we have submitted for the UCSC Comprehensive
Campaign.
2.5.2 Goals for the postdoctoral program during the next review period: During the
next eight years it is our aim to:


Establish the endowment for 3-6 UCSC prize postdoctoral fellowships.
Further integrate postdocs into Department life by encouraging closer faculty
mentoring and partnering with faculty in supervising the research of younger
students.
2.6 Objectives, overall quality, and direction of the undergraduate program
2.6.1 Overview: The Department’s undergraduate program is in three parts. The bulk of
undergraduate teaching is done in large introductory courses for non-scientists, which are
used by a large fraction of UCSC undergraduates to meet the campus “Q” (quantitative)
requirement. Astronomy is the largest single supplier of Q courses; 40% of all UCSC
undergrads take an astronomy Q class.
38
With regard to training in the discipline, we believe that Physics is the proper
undergraduate major for future astronomers, and so we do not offer an Astronomy major
per se but instead have partnered with Physics to offer a joint major for professionally
oriented students (the Physics/Astrophysics track [ASPH]). Astronomy’s role is to teach
the upper- and lower-division astronomy courses needed for the track and to supervise
Senior Theses.
We also offer an undergraduate minor for students interested in broadening their
exposure to astronomy but without the rigor of the Physics/Astrophysics major (see
below).
A list of undergraduate Senior Theses in the Astrophysics track since 2003-4 is
given in Appendix IIId, including thesis title, advisor, and the position taken when
leaving UCSC. General information on the undergraduate program is given in the UCSC
course catalog at http://reg.ucsc.edu/catalog/html/programs_courses/physPS.htm (see also
Appendix IIIb). The undergraduate Physics handbook is at
http://physics.ucsc.edu/undergrad/ughandbook06-07.pdf (see also Appendix IIIa).
Course offerings are listed at http://www.astro.ucsc.edu/courses/ugcourses.html, and
course descriptions may be found at http://www.astro.ucsc.edu/courses/ugdesc.html.
Course syllabi are at http://www.astro.ucsc.edu/courses/ugcoursewebpages.html (see
also Appendix IIIc). Undergraduate enrollments and instructors for individual courses
going back several years are in Appendix VIa, a summary of all undergraduate course
enrollments is in Appendix IVc.D, and the number of undergraduate student FTE versus
year are summarized in Appendix IVd.D.
2.6.2 The lower-division curriculum: The goals of the large introductory courses are to
broaden the science horizons of students who are not science-oriented and to increase
their familiarity with quantitative data, measurements, and reasoning (“Q” courses). Our
most popular course is Astronomy 2, a one-quarter overview of all of astronomy that is
taken by ~1,000 students per year (see Appendix IVc.D). Seven other more specialized
introductory courses cover specific topics (e.g., stars, solar system, cosmology, history of
astronomy), most of which also carry Q designations. Their Q content was reviewed and
approved in 2006-7 by the Committee on Educational Policy, and the Department Chair
has the responsibility to ensure that a uniform level of rigor is maintained. Syllabi,
homework sets, and exams are kept on file in the Department office as a resource to
communicate Q standards to new faculty. Altogether, the introductory program for nonscience majors reached roughly 1,750 students in 2006-7.
Parallel versions of five introductory courses are given for science majors, the
difference being the inclusion of more physics and math, including calculus. These
courses also serve as introductory courses for the Physics/Astrophysics major and for the
minor. These courses reach another ~100 students annually.
2.6.3 The Physics/Astrophysics major: The Physics/Astrophysics major (ASPH) was
instituted in 2001, and enrollments are given in Appendix IVa.U and plotted in Figure 5.
This year, there are 51 juniors and seniors enrolled in the program, up from 10 students
39
five years ago. ASPH students now constitute 40% of all Physics majors, which
altogether number 140 undergraduates. This makes UCSC one of the largest bachelors
physics programs in the nation—despite a very small Physics faculty of only 19.5 FTE.
Although Physics is not the subject of this report, it is fair to note this record and express
our thanks for having such a successful undergraduate partner.
Figure 5: Student enrollments in the undergraduate Physics/Astronomy track (ASPH).
In view of the fact that ASPH enrollments are still climbing, goals for the ASPH
major are still developing. We do not yet have a clear idea of what kind of students are
seeking us out, or how qualified they are. With such numbers, it is reasonable that many
will go on to astronomy graduate school and that a handful will go to distinguished
institutions; this is already happening, based on the graduation histories in Appendix IIId.
We are therefore actively trying to attract the most promising students in the UC system
and have started an elite Freshman Discovery Seminar (Ay 70) for the best incoming
students each fall quarter, with enrollment limited to fifteen. The class takes students on
field trips to Mt. Hamilton and on tours of several campus astronomy labs. Three
Regents Scholars who participated last year declared that Ay70 was the most important
formative experience of their freshman year.
The upper-division curriculum for ASPH contains five courses on core topics
such as stars, high-energy astrophysics, cosmology, and planets/solar systems (a sixth
course, on GR, is taught by Physics). An optional advanced lab is also offered. The
other degree requirement is a Senior Thesis, many of which are also directed by Physics
faculty. A list of students receiving the degree is in Appendix IVb.U, and Senior Thesis
projects are in Appendix IIId. To help ASPH students find faculty supervisors, we have
instituted a twice-yearly “Astronomy Research Social,” where faculty, grads, and
postdocs present potential research topics. Colleagues from NASA Ames, SLAC, LLNL,
and LANL will visit next fall and give tips on how to apply for summer lab internships.
40
The position of Undergraduate Advisor has recently been created to mentor
undergraduates and connect them with appropriate faculty. All of these developments are
quite recent.
2.6.4 Teaching assistants: In 2006-7, Astronomy employed 29 teaching assistants to
service 1865 lower-division students, for a student/TA ratio of 64. 21.5 of these were
Astronomy students, and 7.5 came from Physics and Earth and Planetary Sciences. The
history of TA allocations from the Division is given in Appendix IVf.D. The target
student/TA ratio used by the Division to allocate TAs to Astronomy has hovered near 80,
but the Department has historically provided more, which is why the actual student/TA
ratio last year was only 64. The Division TA allocation was $120 K, but we spent $151
K (plus another $12 K for graders). The extra $31 K came from carry-forward funds.
These will be exhausted after next year, and we will then have to cut back to the Division
ratio of 80. This will cause hardship to instructors, but we will still have enough TAs to
support all Astronomy graduate students who need TAs, though barely.
2.6.5 Undergraduate teaching quality: The main way that teaching quality is
monitored (in all types of classes) is through student evaluations, which are included in
each faculty’s promotion file and are read and discussed by peers at promotion time. A
teaching appraisal is included in the Chair’s (or UCO Director’s) letter to the Dean,
which is provided to the candidate. The Department has a strong teaching ethic, and
student evaluations overall are very positive. Indeed, in 2006-7, Adjunct Professor
Adriane Steinacker received the UCSC Excellence in Teaching Award. Some faculty are
also experimenting with novel techniques such as inquiry-based learning and clicker
methodology. One faculty member was referred to the campus Center for Teaching
Excellence for coaching to improve lecture presentations, prompted by comments in
student evaluations.
2.6.6 Measures of program quality:
Undergraduate outcomes in the
Physics/Astrophysics track are summarized in Appendix IIId. Nearly half of ASPH
Senior-Thesis students are going on to astronomy or physics graduate school, and the
other half are in a variety of technical and non-technical positions. In 2004, ASPH
student Sloane Wiktorowicz won the Chancellor’s Award for graduating in the top 1% of
the class, and in 2006, Aaron Wolf won the Steck Award for best UCSC Senior Thesis.
Other than student evaluations, which are overwhelmingly positive, we do not
have metrics to monitor program quality in the large introductory classes.
2.6.7 Gaps in the undergraduate program: Though growth in the undergraduate major
has been impressive, access to first-class computer facilities is still evolving. The same
problems that affect graduate students on the Department computer network also plague
the undergraduates. An undergraduate “computer lounge” was created recently with
connections to all computer networks, but access to the UCO network still needs a faculty
research account. Undergraduates also require expensive software packages like IDL and
Mathematica, and campus financing for these has not yet been worked out. The lounge is
also located far away in another building, whereas it should really be centrally located to
41
place undergraduates in close contact with graduate students and faculty. For all of these
reasons, the present lounge is an interim solution and needs further improvement.
The second missing element is a first-class undergraduate laboratory. Such labs
are the jewel of astronomy bachelors programs elsewhere, but our lab course is optional,
and frankly somewhat marginal owing to lack of adequate space, equipment, and
technical support. An ideal goal would be to unify the computer lounge and lab space to
create a kind of “magnet area” that would be the focus of undergraduate life, as happens
in good departments elsewhere. Private funds might be found for lab equipment, but
the campus needs to provide space and technical help.
In addition to the Physics/Astrophysics major, the Department also offers an older
Astronomy minor. However, the requirements of this degree have now been largely
duplicated by the major, and the high rigor of the minor drives away students who wish
to go beyond introductory astronomy but do not wish to acquire full pre-professional
training. Requirements for the minor will be reviewed and revised in 2007-8.
2.6.8 Proposals pending for new undergraduate programs: None.
2.6.9 Goals for the undergraduate program: Given the relative youth of the
undergraduate Physics/Astrophysics major, our goals for the next review period are as
follows:





Improve undergraduate laboratory and computing facilities, supported partly by
campus resources and partly by private fund-raising.
Attract high-quality undergrads by offering special programs for talented
freshmen.
Revise and streamline requirements for the minor so that it services students with
a wider range of interests and backgrounds.
Place a significant number of ASPH majors in high-ranking graduate programs.
Increase access to undergrad research opportunities at UCSC, LLNL, LBL,
SLAC, and LANL.
2.7 Administrative resources
2.7.1 Department budget: Appendix If gives three types of budget summaries.
Appendix If.1 shows coarsely binned fund totals going back three years with starting
balances, expenditures for that year, and carry-forwards. Appendix If.2 covers the last 11
years and shows income versus expenditures by year with a somewhat finer division into
categories. This is the most useful table for showing trends in the operating budget with
time. Appendix If.3 provides a detailed look at expenses in 2006-7.
The available funds to run the academic program consist of the operating budget
(which has hovered in the high thirty-thousand dollar range since 1998-99), plus roughly
$10 K per year from opportunity funds (the Department’s share of grant overhead), plus
$3 K for instructional equipment (mainly student computers), plus $3 K in “reward
42
funds” for teaching summer session classes, for total annual cash revenues of roughly
$58 K (faculty recruitment costs are paid for separately.) Aside from some tiny gift and
endowment income, these are the total cash resources available to the Chair. Their
amount has increased by less than 5% since 1999-00 (see Appendix If.2), and their real
purchasing power has declined by 15% based on the Consumer Price Index.
This cash budget does not pay for office staff, who are discussed separately
below. It does cover all supplies, xeroxing, instructional materials, printing charges,
administrative phones, equipment and computer purchases, new furniture, half the cost of
space renovations, extra compensation for lecturers beyond that covered by the Division,
half of the colloquium budget (the other half comes from UCO), the Department’s
contributions to faculty start-up packages, social events and retreats, student subsidies for
colloquium lunches and dinners, a large fraction of meeting and workshop costs, a
fraction of web development costs, graduate student recruitment costs, and the salary of
the Undergraduate Advisor. Many of these categories are new within the last two years.
Stepped-up fund-raising activities in connection with the new development assistant will
be a further drain. This budget is not large enough, and we ran a deficit of roughly $15
K in FY2006.
The worst problems with the budget are (1) the lack of any margin to deal with
unplanned events (such as a grad student whose funding falls through or a class that
suddenly loses an instructor) and (2) the inability to reward, encourage, or support new
activities. Unlike many other leading astronomy departments, the UCSC Department has
virtually no endowment or gift income because such funds have always gone to UCO.
To change this, the current Chair is contributing both Chair’s stipend and summer salary
to found an endowment. These gifts continue a long tradition of personal contributions
by Chairs to the Department budget, a tradition called “saintly” by the last External
Review committee. We do not wish to imply that Astronomy is any worse off than other
departments at UCSC—all departments have such tiny budgets. That said, $15 K more is
needed just to cover current costs, with an additional $20 K for emergencies and some
discretionary money for the Chair.
2.7.2 Department staffing: The campus funds two FTE in the Department office, the
Department Administrator plus one assistant.
Travel, purchasing, and grant
administration are provided gratis for all faculty by the UCO Business Office, which we
estimate to be the equivalent of three more FTE; these are not paid for by campus funds.
An additional 0.25 FTE comes from Information and Technical Services for the website
and the Department computer network. We also include 0.5 FTE from Physics for our
share of their Undergraduate Advisor. The total staff comes to 5.75 FTE, of whom 2.75
are paid out of campus funds, 3 come from the Observatory, and only two work directly
for the Chair.
This staff is the same as we had at the last review, which the previous External
Review committee called too small by half, and workloads have increased since then.
For comparison, the UC Irvine Physics department has a staff of 22 FTE for a department
with 46 faculty, the UC Berkeley Astronomy department has a staff of 9 for a faculty of
43
16, and Princeton Astronomy has a staff of 8 for a faculty of 16. These are ratios of
about two to one. Our staffing level of 5.75 for 23 faculty is clearly too small, and many
important jobs are getting done poorly or not at all. For example, we have no paid help to
assist with astronomy classroom demonstrations, audio-visual materials, or laboratory
demonstrations, despite the fact that we teach more Q classes than any other department
on campus—all of this work is done by faculty. There is no permanent position of
Undergraduate Advisor despite the many students now seeking research projects in the
Physics/Astrophysics major. The Department Administrator needs trained assistants to
maintain the Department website and academic, budgetary, and alumni records. A
technical writer is needed to assist faculty in preparing major grant proposals and to write
an outreach newsletter. A visualization expert is needed to assist faculty in producing
high-quality images and movies, which are becoming increasingly de rigeur to
communicate and publish scientific work. Adding these FTE would roughly double the
Department staff, in agreement with the External Review committee’s appraisal and with
actual staffing levels in other departments. The full-time development staff person to be
added next year will help, but even then the campus will supply only 50%.
Besides TAs (which were discussed in Section 2.6.4), the final component of the
budget is Temporary Academic Staff (TAS), who are non-ladder lecturers and adjunct
professors teaching classes for which ladder faculty are not available. For the last two
years, TAS staff have taught 30% of the lower-division undergraduate enrollments. The
quality of teaching by Astronomy TAS staff is excellent according to student evaluations.
The Division funding history for TASs is given in Appendix IVf.D. The dollar amount
has declined by roughly one-third since 1999-00, and we ran a deficit in this category last
year of $8 K, or 25%. Our need for TASs may decline in future as more faculty are
hired. However, right now, TAS lecturers are an important part of the Department’s
instructional program, and support provided by the Division does not cover their cost.
To summarize, through 2006-7, the cash budget of the Astronomy Department
declined by roughly 15% in purchasing power since the last External Review, and the
TAS budget declined by one-third. The TA budget kept pace with enrollments but is not
large enough to cover Astronomy’s preferred student/TA ratio. In dollars, the 2006-7
budget was $58 K in cash, $31 K for TASs, $16 K for graders, and $120 K for TAs, for a
total resource budget of $225 K. Deficits were $15 K in cash, $8 K for TASs, and $30
K for TAs, for a total deficit of $53 K, or 24% overall. Looking forward, we can
handle part of this by cutting back to the Division standard of 80 students per TA, and the
TAS deficit may resolve automatically as more faculty are hired. However, strategies to
deal with the cash deficit are not immediately apparent. Our already small Department
staff also remained constant since the last External Review despite a large workload
increase.
A consequence of the small-staff, low-budget policy for departments at UCSC is
that few faculty want to be department chairs, and leadership at the department level is
weak. The previous External Review committee also mentioned this problem. The net
result is that UCSC spends a large amount on faculty salaries but does not offer enough
44
support to reap the full benefit of those salaries. In our opinion, campus funding
streams need to be rebalanced to maximize overall campus productivity.
2.7.3 Space: The Department shares quarters with UCO, and it is difficult to discuss the
question of space needs separately from the Observatory, whose needs are also acute.
Present campus plans say that no additional state-funded academic space will be
provided to Astronomy before 2018, and probably not even then. If we are to win new
space, it must come from new projects, as CfAO did, or because UCO gains new space
through its separate line item in the University budget, which in turn might free up space
for the Department.
A space study conducted in the fall of 2005 showed that total personnel in
Astronomy units grew by 45% over the previous decade but that the number of faculty
increased by only 5%. The growth was due mainly to more technical staff in UCO and to
larger faculty research grants, which led to more graduate students and postdoctoral
fellows. The CfAO building absorbed only about half of this growth; the rest was
accommodated through higher density. In 2006, the Department was given four more
offices and a conference room in a distant building. We are shifting graduate students
and emeritus faculty over there, at two per office. We also received a large bull-pen
office, which was used for the undergraduate computer lounge.
Looking forward, the Department can consolidate a bit further by converting one
spare classroom to office space, moving the Department Administrator into the
Department office, withdrawing academic offices from faculty acting as administrators,
and putting visitor offices in printer rooms. The sunset of CfAO in November 2009 will
yield additional space. Altogether, we can absorb perhaps 10-20% more people, which
would be adequate to house the requested four new faculty plus their graduate students
and postdocs. This is also consistent with the 10-20% expansion in the graduate
program mentioned above.
In short, we are optimistic that four new Department faculty and their research
groups can be accommodated within in the present space footprint. However, this
assumes that most of CfAO will be retained as Departmental academic space, and it does
not allow for any significant expansion by the Observatory. Other space needs would
also be unmet, such as facilities for a new visualization center (see below), a first-class
undergraduate laboratory, and expansion space for future supercomputers. It is well
known that lack of space is the main obstacle to growing programs in the PBSci Division,
and Astronomy suffers acutely from this problem, along with other departments. Our
development program places high priority on funds for new space, but, realistically, the
Division space problem is one that we cannot solve on our own.
The argument for using a large part of the CfAO building for Department
academic space would be bolstered if a new scientific center could be created and housed
there, possibly in addition to a down-sized future CfAO. Possibilities are discussed under
New Initiatives below.
45
3. Future directions for the research program
This section is in three parts: the first part draws high-level conclusions
concerning the strengths and weaknesses of the research program based on the preceding
evidence. The second section lists illustrative science goals within each of our three
science excellence areas and mentions actions that will need to be taken in order to
realize those goals. The third section describes three major new Department initiatives.
3.1 Assets and challenges
The following broad conclusions have emerged from the above discussion:

The Department’s proposed areas of science excellence—cosmology and galaxy
formation, high-energy astrophysics, and star/planet/solar-system formation—will
remain key areas of astronomical research for at least the next decade. The basic
themes of the research program are well aligned with anticipated future major
scientific developments.

The current faculty has significant strength in all three chosen science areas, and
affiliated faculty in Physics, EPS, and AMS also fit in well with this program.
Recent hires have bolstered all three fields and strengthened the cohesiveness of
the program, within the Department and between it and its affiliated departments.

A particular asset of UCSC Astronomy is the presence of excellent theoretical and
observational groups working in close proximity. Such collaborations are
particularly powerful when the needed instrumentation originates at UCSC, such
as the DEEP2 Survey, which used DEIMOS, the extrasolar planet searches, which
use HIRES at Keck and telescopes at Lick, the CATS survey of high-redshift
galaxies, utilizing the laser-guide star AO system at Keck, and the budding
gamma-ray program with Physics based on GLAST. However, the full potential
of collaboration has not yet been fully realized, and future Astronomy hires
should be used, among other things, to knit instrumentalists, observers, and
theorists more tightly together. Skimming scientific cream from the TMT and
adaptive optics is particularly important. Another goal should be to increase
theoretical expertise in cosmology, stellar evolution, and galaxy formation to
balance the large number of observers in this area.

The faculty is well positioned to exploit most upcoming telescopes, with the
notable exception of long-wavelength observatories such as Herschel, JWST,
ALMA, and the EVLA. Such long-wavelength data are crucial for star, planet,
and galaxy formation, and utilizing them is a major reason to broaden faculty
expertise.

Fourteen faculty are leading programs in computational astrophysics, including
Woosley, Lin, Madau, Laughlin, Ramirez-Ruiz, Krumholz, and Fortney in
46
Astronomy; Primack and Aguirre in Physics; Glatzmaier, Nimmo, and Asphaug
in EPS; and Garaud and Brummell in AMS. Research programs span end-stage
stellar evolution, planetary structure, high-energy astrophysics, gravitational
dynamics, fluid dynamics, and magneto-hydrodynamics and share many common
needs for both software and hardware. The size and breadth of this group are
major assets, and together the group is seeking to create a computational
astrophysics center, which is our second top-priority new initiative (see below).

A concern is the lack of any formal funded center for astrophysics. This lack
comes at a time when many of our competitors have created similar centers, such
as the Kavli Institutes at Stanford and Chicago, the Institute for Theory and
Computation at Harvard, the Physics Frontier Center at Chicago, the Moore
Center for Theoretical Cosmology and Physics at Caltech, and the Theoretical
Astrophysics Center at UCB. Generated from a mix of private, federal, and
campus funds, these centers support a constant stream of visitors, conferences,
workshops, and the all-important prize postdoctoral fellowships. If UCSC
Astronomy expects to stay among the first rank of leading astronomy
departments, it must create something similar. Our initiative to found a
computational astrophysics center is presently the strongest candidate for filling
this need.
3.2 Sample science goals
This section lists illustrative goals for the next decade in each of the three chosen
science areas, together with major actions that will be needed in order to make them a
reality.
3.2.1 Star, planet, and solar system formation: Goals in this area are to play a
leadership role in finding and characterizing large numbers of extrasolar planetary
systems and to measure and model the properties of interesting individual systems. On
larger scales, we hope to make major progress in unraveling the fundamental physics of
star formation and use that knowledge to explain the star-formation scaling laws that are
emerging from studies of external galaxies.
Key actions include enlarging our ongoing Doppler planet searches to find more
extrasolar planets with HIRES on Keck and the new dedicated APF telescope on Mt.
Hamilton. As they lengthen in time, these databases will become more and more
powerful for finding longer-period giant planets (like our Jupiter) and “super-earths” in
multi-planet systems. We are already involved in the direct detection of “young jupiters”
close to parent stars using the Spitzer satellite, and we expect to find more using AO on
Keck and TMT and NASA’s SIM and TPF satellites (if the latter are built). We will also
pursue transit searches with existing equipment and with the future Corot and Kepler
satellites. Larger, long-term milestones are acquiring infrared spectra of individual
protoplanetary disks and young jupiters with TMT.
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Sample theory goals in this area include accurate dynamical models of multiplanet systems and interior and atmosphere models for hot jupiters. The latter will enable
us to simulate the appearance of individual gas-giant planets taking orbital and insolation
characteristics into account. These projects would benefit from new faculty FTE with
expertise in radiative transfer and/or dynamic planetary atmospheres. The resultant
simulations could be used to make the first truly realistic images of distant planetary
systems, which in turn leads to the concept of a visualization center as an integral
component within the computational astrophysics institute.
Star-formation studies will require both hydrodynamic and magnetohydrodynamic simulations of collapsing interstellar gas clouds. Perhaps more than any
other computation, these require the world’s very largest supercomputers, which means
having machines like Pleiades and its descendants on campus for debugging codes and
analyzing huge simulation outputs that will run to many terabytes. For this, a state-ofthe-art visualization center is again needed.
Data on star formation will explode with the construction of long-wavelength
telescopes starting with Herschel in 2008 and extending through JWST, ALMA, and the
EVLA. These telescopes will collectively provide detailed information on gas chemistry
and properties near forming stars within our Galaxy, the integrated properties of starforming regions in external galaxies, ice and dust grains coagulating to form protoplanets,
and detection of individual protoplanets. The data will potentially unlock one of
astronomy’s greatest secrets—why and how stars form. Thanks to these telescopes, the
subject of star and planet formation is arguably going to be the most exciting
astronomical frontier of the next twenty years, and UCSC’s ability to attract excellent
graduate students and postdocs depends critically on mounting a successful program in
this area. We already have much of the needed theoretical expertise but would benefit
from theorists working on interstellar molecule or grain chemistry. We may also wish to
hire one or more long-wavelength observers who would observe with these telescopes.
A further opportunity in star and planet formation is afforded by the coming
CODEP faculty search in Fall 2009 within EPS. Possibilities discussed include an
expert in planetary atmospheric dynamics or a cosmo-chemist working on the chemical
composition of the proto-solar nebula. Either of these would articulate well with
Astronomy. A third possibility is an expert in the interiors of “super-earths,” who could
form the nucleus for a future center on the geological and atmospheric evolution of
terrestrial planets more massive than our own. Super-earths in large numbers will likely
be detected by planet searches.
3.2.2 High-energy astrophysics: The High Energy Astrophysics Group at UCSC deals
with a broad range of astrophysical problems with a particular focus on the interaction of
matter with radiation under extreme physical conditions. Objects include the Universe as
a whole, clusters of galaxies, black holes and jets in AGN, and accreting black holes and
neutron stars. Recurring themes are how matter accretes onto compact objects (such as
neutron stars, gamma-ray bursters, and supernova explosions), and nonthermal processes
in astrophysical plasmas including high-energy particle production. This last is closely
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related to experimental work being done in the Physics Department. Sample questions
illustrating these themes include models for the structure and formation of gamma-ray
bursts (GRBs), the growth and evolution of supermassive black holes (BHs) that power
quasars and active galactic nuclei (AGN), and a detailed understanding of supernovae
explosions. GLAST will provide important data on the gamma-ray spectra of GRBs, and
Keck and TMT will determine the rate of formation of AGN and black hole growth over
the lifetime of the Universe. Projects for using distant supernovae as cosmological
yardsticks are being widely discussed in the astronomical community, and our faculty are
working hard to develop the theory needed to convert these objects into precision cosmic
distance indicators. Finally, possibilities for detecting nearby remnant black holes at the
centers of galaxies with Hubble have been exhausted, but the subject is going to be
rejuvenated with adaptive optics on Keck and will receive an even bigger boost from
TMT. Herschel, ALMA, JWST, and the EVLA will resolve the long-standing problem
of whether galactic nuclei are powered by starbursts or by AGN.
High-energy astrophysics offers some of the best topics for collaboration between
UCSC theorists and observers. The budding GLAST collaboration is an example, with
observational roots in Physics and theorists participating from Astronomy. Black holes
are another area where we have both theorists and observers working. None of our
observers is as yet participating in distant supernovae surveys, but a seat on the proposed
Large Synoptic Survey Telescope would open that avenue.
Much theoretical work in high-energy astrophysics again depends on very highresolution computer simulations, which have similar requirements to those already
mentioned. A radiative transfer theorist would be a great help to supernovae models.
3.2.3 Cosmology and galaxy formation: As pursued at UCSC, this topic means the
evolution of the Universe as it was emerging from the “dark ages” before there were
galaxies, followed by the formation of galaxies and their evolution to the present time.
Our goals in this area are to simulate the first collapsed structures in the Universe
(roughly 500 million years after the Big Bang) and follow their subsequent merging and
growth to become fully formed galaxies. In parallel, we are well positioned to develop a
global theory of star formation in galaxies by embedding molecular cloud models within
the broader environments of galaxies. That same context will be needed to convert
supernovae into precision cosmic distance indicators. The resultant supernova theories
will also yield precision nucleosynthesis predictions for the abundance of the chemical
elements, which several UCO observers are measuring in stars, globular clusters, and
galaxies.
Observationally, UCSC will build on the DEEP2, AEGIS, and First Galaxies
surveys using Keck and Hubble, and TMT and JWST will extend this work for at least
another 10-20 years. Maturing laser-guide-star technology on Keck and (later) on TMT
will yield spectacular high-resolution AO images of galaxies at near-IR and even redder
optical bands. The four upcoming long-wavelength telescopes (Herschel, JWST, ALMA,
and EVLA) will measure star formation on galactic scales back to early cosmic times,
providing a vital test of early star-formation theories. Nearer by, SEGUE’s survey of the
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motions and compositions of stars in the Milky Way—and similar UCSC data on M31
from Keck and TMT—will provide the ultimate challenge to galaxy-formation models.
Future extensions of SAGES and similar globular cluster surveys will reveal the cosmic
roots of star formation in nearby galaxies. Principal UCSC instruments needed for these
nearby studies are high-resolution and multi-object spectrographs on Keck, and, later,
TMT.
The final topic in this realm is the nature of dark matter. UCSC instrument
opportunities include the GLAST satellite, which may detect dark-matter annihilation
within galactic dark-matter halos, and SCIPP experiments at the Large Hadron Collider,
which may create dark-matter particles directly. Regardless of these findings, the
astrophysical context for dark matter will always be important, and Astronomy can help
with high-resolution simulations of cosmic structure and galaxy dark-matter halos.
In considering new faculty for this area, we recall that Table 1 showed several
UCO observers working on galaxy formation and stellar evolution but few theorists in
these areas. New theorists who could provide balance in this area include radiativetransfer specialists and a classic stellar-evolution expert, since so many projects touch
this field. Understanding star formation at high redshift needs faculty working with the
suite of new long-wavelength telescopes. High-speed computers for realistic cosmic
simulations are, as always, key.
3.3 New initiatives
A number of themes emerge repeatedly in the above review, which we have taken
as launching pads for new initiatives. UCO plans that also need to be accommodated
include building the TMT and potential expansion and renovation of the UCO shops and
laboratories; the latter, if successful, could free up space for the Department. CfAO, if
continued, will also need space.
3.3.1 Computational astrophysics initiative: A high-priority initiative for the next
review period is to establish and fund a center for computational astrophysics, which we
tentatively call the Center for Cosmic Origin Simulations and Visualizations (COSV).
Given the key role that simulations play in every one of our three science areas, access to
forefront computational facilities is the single most important capital investment
needed by our theory faculty. Such a center would do several things; it would create a
vibrant intellectual home on campus for graduate students and postdocs, it would
advertise UCSC’s computational achievements to the outside world, it would create a
visible focal point for writing grant proposals and partnering with other universities, and
it would be a high-profile magnet for attracting the best graduate students, postdocs, and
visitors. Achieving higher visibility for UCSC efforts is important. A center with firstclass computational facilities and appropriate support would quickly propel this group to
international attention. We reaped that benefit from CfAO, and astrophysics centers at
Harvard, Chicago, UCSB, and Stanford have had the same effect.
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What would COSV need? Faculty are not a problem—we already have a large
pool, and planned future hires will bring more. Space is tight but probably can be
managed (see above). The main challenges are staff support and certain specialized
physical facilities. For example, in the long run we expect that at least two minisupercomputers will be resident on campus, and the extra one will also need its own
space, power, and cooling. Together with Pleiades, these facilities might form the
nucleus of a UCSC high-performance computing center benefiting multiple
departments, an idea that we have suggested to Information and Technical Services.
COSV also needs a visualization center for inspecting simulation outputs, making
cosmic “movies” and other renderings of scientific data, and displaying scientific results
to popular audiences. A “cosmic theatre” in COSV would be a showcase destination on
campus for potential donors. The last element of COSV is a suite of endowed prize
postdoctoral fellowships, which would also count toward satisfying the general need for
prize postdoctoral fellows expressed in Section 2.5. A budget for visitors, conferences,
and workshops would round out the package.
The operating budget of such a center would be of order $1 M per year (not
counting faculty salaries), of which half would come from private (i.e., campus) funds
and half from faculty grants, with the hope of also winning federal center funds like those
that funded CfAO. Launching COSV as part of the Thirty-Meter Telescope is yet another
possibility, as is partnering with other nearby computational powers such as Berkeley,
Stanford, Ames, LLNL, and LBL. The geographic center of such a partnership would be
in Silicon Valley, which would facilitate links to UCSC’s Silicon Valley Center and the
UARC. Raising campus funds will require strong support from the campus Development
office, and we therefore put COSV forward as one of two top-priority items for the
UCSC Comprehensive Campaign (the other being prize postdoctoral fellowships).
3.3.2 Long-wavelength astronomy initiative: Star, planet, and galaxy formation
promise to be the fastest growing areas in astronomy in the next decade, in large part
because of four upcoming long-wavelength telescopes—Herschel, JWST, ALMA, and
EVLA—which will revolutionize the field. However excellent all the other aspects of
our program may—Doppler planet detection, AO imaging, TMT spectra, theoretical starformation simulations, etc.—failure to exploit these new telescopes will leave our
research program seriously incomplete.
We are not sure at this writing exactly how to pursue this goal—what
wavelengths to pursue within this broad regime, and whether to hire observers, theorists,
or a blend. Developing a strategy is an urgent task for next year, and the External
Review committee’s advice is particularly timely and welcome. Given the broad science
and large wavelength domain, starting with two FTE is a minimum, and hence we request
adding two more FTE to the present hiring plan, for a total of four. A strategy for
accelerating these positions by mortgaging future vacancies is mentioned in the next
section.
3.3.3 Development initiative: The third major new initiative is a concerted effort in
private fund-raising. This activity would be new for the Department, which has not
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engaged in full-scale development efforts before. In collaboration with the Observatory
and CfAO, we have been laying groundwork by enlarging our list of potential donors and
courting them with campus events and telescope tours (see Entrepreneurial Efforts).
With help from our new full-time development staff person next year, we are poised to
intensify contacts with potential donors, create a newsletter, reach out to Astronomy
alumni, and assist broadly in the Campus Comprehensive Campaign. As stated, the
highest priorities for new Department funds are endowed prize postdoctoral fellowships
and a computational astrophysics center. Next in line are graduate fellowships and
the Department endowment. Third in line are facilities and space for a first-class
undergraduate laboratory. Development efforts in the Department must be tightly
coordinated with the Observatory and with CfAO, which have similar aspirations but
different projects. The Department also needs its own development budget to pay for
fund-raising activities like travel, entertainment, and materials.
3.4 Faculty hiring plan and schedule
Four new Department FTE were requested at the last External Review in 2000.
Despite concurrence by the Dean and the Committee on Planning and Budget (see
Appendix Ik), this expansion did not occur, and, owing to retirements and faculty moving
to administration, the number of effective6 Department FTE in 2007-8 will actually be
one fewer than it was in 1999-00. The current Divisional hiring plan (Appendix Ih) has
Astronomy receiving two new Department faculty by 2010-11, one in theoretical
planet/star/solar system formation, the other in theoretical galaxy formation and
cosmology. These theory slots cannot be let go—with only six active theorists, the
theory program has important gaps and lacks critical mass as it is. The previous External
Review committee also urged more theorists, who function as “glue” to bind the
Department together. Hence, the present plan leaves no room at all for a longwavelength initiative, which would require two more FTE, or four in all. Prospective
retirements provide little relief, as at most only one Department member is likely to retire
during the next review period, and near the end at that.
All four FTE are needed quickly, for several reasons. Department manpower is
stretched very thin right now with only six active theoreticians—this number needs to be
replenished fast. The opening dates of major long-wavelength observatories are also just
around the corner—Herschel in 2008, ALMA in 2012, JWST and the EVLA near 2015,
and TMT soon after that (we hope). The program to utilize these assets must therefore be
in place soon. We also want our new long-wavelength faculty to interact closely with
junior faculty we have just hired and with star, planet, and galaxy programs now taking
shape on the Thirty-Meter Telescope. The next few years is therefore the time to build
up this group. At minimum, it is vital to have all four positions approved before the
next search, which starts in Fall 2008. That approval would allow the first positions to
be defined as broadly as possible, which would yield the best pool of candidates.
“Effective” here means counting Bodenheimer as a Department FTE rather than a UCO
FTE and not counting Thorsett or Blumenthal, who are away on administrative leave.
6
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Since two administrative vacancies still belong to the Department, a possible way
to accelerate the long-wavelength positions is to mortgage against the future departures
or retirements of the administrators. However, we note that workload alone also justifies
most of the increase we are requesting. Our 30% enrollment growth since the last review
(plus creation of the ASPH major) justify two new FTE, and further enrollment increases
due to campus growth would justify 1.5 FTE more, through 2010-11.
The predicted histogram of Department faculty ages in 2009 was shown in the
bottom panel of Figure 1 (red bars). It is already heavily weighted toward junior faculty,
and this will increase with subsequent hires. Therefore, to balance the Department age
distribution and to provide continuity of senior leadership in the face of coming
retirements, one of the theory positions should be filled at the senior level.
For completeness, we note that Physics still has one open unfilled astrophysics
position, EPS has one more CODEP position, and AMS is planning several more
positions that relate to astrophysics. The planned years to fill most of these slots are
2010-2011 or before. We hope to participate closely in these hirings.
4. Critical issues and strategies to deal with them
These issues were discussed above, and solutions were proposed. This section
presents a final summary of major points.
4.1 Faculty FTE
Astronomy proposes to further broaden its scientific program in order to attract
more and better graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty. Our strategy to do
this is to hire four new Department faculty before 2010-11. Two of these positions are
already in the Divisional hiring plan; two more are needed to start a new initiative in
long-wavelength astronomy. This initiative will allow us to participate fully in active
areas of astronomy through the next decade by exploiting data from four much-awaited
long-wavelength observatories. The research program of the Department will then
stretch from gamma-rays to submillimeter/radio, and the resulting multi-wavelength
program will be a powerful draw for graduate students and postdocs. Indeed, we fear
that failure to engage with these exciting new observatories could well damage the
program.
For compelling reasons, all four FTE are needed urgently by 2012. If
necessary, they could be obtained by mortgaging against the retirements or departures of
present administrators. To balance the Department age distribution and provide strong
leadership in the face of retirements, one of the theory positions should be filled at the
senior level.
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4.2 Graduate and postdoctoral programs
These programs need improvement in various ways, and a study of graduate
program management and requirements is underway. Three issues require campus help.
One is to broaden the research program by hiring more faculty FTE, as discussed
above. The second is to attract more international students, and campus administration
is requested to continue to pressure the UC Office of the President to bring non-resident
tuitions in line with those of domestic students. The third is endowed fellowship support
at all levels, especially for prize postdoctoral fellows. Santa Cruz is the only leading
astronomy department without its own postdoctoral fellows. This impairs the quality of
intellectual life and is a highly visible deficit when attracting new faculty and students.
4.3 Space
All Astronomy units need more office space, and the Observatory needs more lab
space. Unused space on paper now is nil, but roughly 15% more could be obtained by
consolidation and renovations. The transition of CfAO off NSF funding in November
2009 will free up offices that could be used to host another center, such as the proposed
Center for Cosmic Origins Simulations and Visualizations (COSV) or perhaps a
generalized astrophysics theory center attached to the Thirty Meter Telescope. The
visualization functions within COSV require a visualization laboratory and a theatre
for displaying and analyzing large computer simulations. Future astronomy minisupercomputers will require specially conditioned space with power and cooling similar
to Pleiades. Such facilities could serve as the nucleus for a broader UCSC HighPerformance Computing Center. New space obtained by UCO as part of infrastructure
renewal might release some space for the Department.
4.4 Campus support
Staff and budget support from the campus to the Department is extremely thin in
all areas. The Department budget has declined by 15% in real dollars since the last
External Review, and workloads and tasks have multiplied. The cash deficit this year
was $15 K (out of $58 K), and the total deficit (including TA and TAS funds) was $58 K
out of $225 K. The budget contains almost no discretionary funds for the Chair to solve
problems. Unlike other leading astronomy departments, there is no significant
endowment and no endowment income to provide funding flexibility. We are trying to
change that, and raising an endowment is a high development priority. TA and TAS
deficits can be dealt with if necessary by raising the student/TA ratio and adjusting class
offerings. However, a cash budget increase of $15 K for annual operating funds is
needed immediately, plus a Chair’s discretionary account of $20 K for emergencies
and other needs.
Department staff currently number 5.75 FTE, of whom the UCO Business Office
provides three and only two actually work in the Department office. This number is
about half of what is needed, and it is also roughly half of what is found in comparable
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departments at other universities. Many tasks are being done expensively by faculty, the
Chair, or the Department Administrator, and some are not being done at all. In our
opinion, the staffing level is so low as to seriously impair unit productivity.
4.5 New resources
We realize that UCSC budgets are tight and that much of the responsibility for
finding new resources rests in the Department. The assignment next year of a full-time
development person to Astronomy is an excellent first step, but, to use that person, the
Department must also have a separate budget for development expenses. Finally,
faculty must ultimately play the central role in proposal-writing and cultivating the timeintensive personal relationships that are an essential part of effective fund-raising.
Astronomy leadership is committed to motivating faculty, but the campus must help by
providing space and matching funds to generate competitive proposals and adequate
Department support staff to free up faculty energies for more productive tasks.
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