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Chuck Claver Receives AURA Technology / Innovation Award
LSST Systems Scientist Chuck Claver
AURA announced LSST Systems Scientist Chuck Claver as one of the 2013 recipients of its Technology/Innovation Award (see http://www.aura-astronomy.org/news/awards.asp). He is being recognized for his outstanding contribution to LSST as Project Systems Engineer over the previous five years.
He has successfully led LSST systems engineering through major NSF reviews, including the Preliminary Design Review and the Joint Interface and Management Review, both of which were prerequisites for NSB approval of advancing the project to the final design phase. The LSST systems engineering effort was cited as a key project success by the committee that conducted the Preliminary Design Review.
Chuck was originally trained as a scientist, but set aside his personal science interests over this period to move the LSST Project forward. His combination of scientific background with experience in instrumentation and optical design enabled him to carry out the systems engineering role and to bridge the gap that sometimes exists between the wishes of the scientists and engineering reality.
To perform the role of systems engineer, Chuck had to train himself in SysML, the cornerstone of LSST’s Model Based Systems Engineering approach. SysML captures requirements, flow down, traceability, and validation of the entire project. Through Chuck’s efforts, the LSST Project has carried out the systems engineering required to define a complete observing system that will meet the challenging scientific and technical requirements. Chuck led a team of subsystem engineers to complete the requirements flow down, develop the requirements documentation, complete analysis and simulations, and develop the tools necessary to organize and manage the LSST engineering enterprise.
Chuck has been working on LSST since the late 1990’s, but it is his contributions as the Systems Engineer that are particularly noteworthy and are the reason that the LSST Project Office nominated him for this technical excellence award.
Chuck played a key role in bringing the Project through a critical period. The LSST Project has now added two Systems Engineering staff members to the group, who have validated Chuck’s approach including his selection of SysML. In the future, Chuck will continue with the Systems Engineering group as Systems Scientist and will focus on the scientific impact of project decisions as well as on the planning for commissioning.
LSST is a public-private partnership. Funding for design and development activity comes from the National Science Foundation, private donations, grants to universities, and in-kind support at Department of Energy laboratories and other LSSTC Institutional Members:
Adler Planetarium; Argonne National Laboratory; Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL); California Institute of Technology; Carnegie Mellon University; Chile; Cornell University; Drexel University; Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory; George Mason University; Google, Inc.; Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Institut de Physique Nucleaire et de Physique des Particules (IN2P3); Johns Hopkins University; Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) – Stanford University; Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, Inc.; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL); Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL); National Optical Astronomy Observatory; National Radio Astronomy Observatory; Princeton University; Purdue University; Research Corporation for Science Advancement; Rutgers University; SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; Space Telescope Science Institute; Texas A & M University; The Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic; The Pennsylvania State University; The University of Arizona; University of California at Davis; University of California at Irvine; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; University of Michigan; University of Pennsylvania; University of Pittsburgh; University of Washington; Vanderbilt and Fisk Universities
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LSST E-News is a free email publication of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Project. It is for informational purposes only, and the information is subject to change without notice.
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