In brief

Swapan Chattopadhyay, formerly an associate director at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia, and adjunct professor of physics at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, begins a new post this month as the first chair of accelerator physics in the UK. He has been appointed to the Sir John Cockcroft Chair jointly by the universities of Liverpool, Manchester, and Lancaster, and is serving as the inaugural director of the Cockcroft Institute, a newly created international center in accelerator science and technology. Chattopadhyay is also a principal member of the steering committees for the UK’s proposed flagship light-source facility, known as the 4GLS. Chattopadhyay came to Jefferson Lab in 2001 after 25 years at the University of California, Berkeley.

Joining the American Association of Physics Teachers as its director of finance and administration and chief financial officer is Carroll W. Martin, who began his new post in October. Martin served from 2003 to 2006 as chief financial officer of the National Medical Association in Washington, DC, where he helped boost the organization’s operational efficiency and restructured it financially.

Tim de Zeeuw has been named director general of the European Southern Observatory effective 1 September 2007. De Zeeuw, who will succeed Catherine Cesarsky, is presently the scientific director of the Leiden Observatory in the College of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at Leiden University, the Netherlands. ESO operates the ESO Very Large Telescope; is constructing the Atacama Large Millimeter Array jointly with the US, Canada, and Japan in cooperation with Chile; and is designing a 42-m extremely large optical/infrared telescope.