In brief

Nobel laureate Carl E. Wieman will leave his faculty position at the University of Colorado at Boulder in January 2007 for a position at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he will head up a Can$12 million (about US$10.3 million) science education project. A Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado, where he will retain a 20% appointment, Wieman will join the faculty of the physics and astronomy department at UBC. Although he won’t officially move to UBC till next January, Wieman is already working on developing its new science education project, which is aimed at emphasizing student experience, stimulating inquiry, and encouraging measurement of educational outcomes, the university said. Wieman, who joined the University of Colorado in 1984, shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for creating Bose–Einstein condensates.

Taft E. Armandroff has been appointed director of the W. M. Keck Observatory in Kamuela, Hawaii, effective 1 July 2006. He will succeed Frederic H. Chaffee, who will end his second five-year term as director on 30 June. Armandroff is presently associate director at the National Optical Astronomical Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, and director of the observatory’s Gemini Science Center. Chaffee, who will remain in Hawaii after his term is over, is credited with nurturing the development and implementation of the adaptive-optics science program at Keck and with helping to develop the Keck interferometer, now being used to search for large planets orbiting stars other than the Sun.

The director of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, has accepted a position at SETI in Mountain View, California. G. Scott Hubbard assumed the Carl Sagan Chair for the Study of Life in the Universe on 15 February. Hubbard, who began his career at Ames in 1987 and was its director since 2002, also served on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, helping to determine the cause for the loss of the space shuttle Columbia. He was also the first director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

Dennis M. Bartels is the new director of the Exploratorium, the San Francisco–based museum of science, art, and human perception. Bartels joined the museum on 1 May, replacing Virginia Carollo Rubin, who had served as acting director since September 2005. For the past five years, Bartels was president of TERC of Cambridge, Massachusetts, a mathematics, science, and technology research and development center.