Join us in congratulating the new Science Collaboration (SC) Coordinator, Dr. Will Clarkson! We appreciate his willingness to serve in this role and his ongoing commitment to the SCs.
Dr. Clarkson is an Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, the co-chair of the SMWLV SC, and a member of TVS SC. He will begin serving jointly with the current Coordinator (Dr. Federica Bianco) on May 1st and take on full leadership responsibilities on June 1st.
We had two amazing candidates for the position, Dr. Will Clarkson and Dr. Matthew Graham (AGN SC, ISSC). It was a close election. The election opened on March 15th, 2022, and remained open through April 15th. We received 580 votes of the 2088 eligible votes (28% turnout). As stated in the LSST Federation Charter, the SC Coordinator is elected by the SC members, with one vote per SC. Assigning each voter to their SC led to a tie: Four SCs had majority votes in favor of Dr. Will Clarkson and four in favor of Dr. Matthew Graham. The tie was broken by averaging the fraction of votes across the SCs, which led to a 52% to 48% majority win for Dr. Clarkson.
Learn more about the LSST Science Collaborations.