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Photo by John Woods/Redline, Winnipeg
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Photo by Michael Aporius, Winnipeg
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Jayanne English, currently enjoys the teaching and research activities associated with being an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Committed to public outreach, she was the astronomy columnist on CBC Radio's "Quirks and Quarks" program (2000-2002). However her forte' is creating colour outreach images from astronomy data. Examples of recent images include the Stephan's Quintet and Seyfert's Sextet groups of galaxies (Hubble Space Telescope) and a vista, within our own Milky Way Galaxy, of the Cygnus Region (Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory). Radio telescope images, like the Cygnus Region, expose the invisible universe and stem from her research work as a member of the International and Canadian Galactic Plane Survey (I/CGPS) which maps in detail the gas and dust between stars. Like many families in Toronto, Canada, Jayanne's traveled on weekends up to cottage country, where they had a mesmerizing view of the sky. Perhaps this is why Jayanne cannot remember a time when she was not fascinated by astronomy. Before her graduation from the Ontario College of Art (1984), she had already begun the B.Sc. program in astronomy at the University of Toronto, where, as befitting an artist, she is remembered as colourful. Her Ph.D. adventure was under the starry skies "down under" at Mount Stromlo & Siding Spring Observatories in Australia, under the supervision of Ken Freeman. After her Ph.D. was granted in 1994 from the Australian National University, she enjoyed the Canadian snows and two enriching post-doctoral fellowships, with Judith Irwin, at Queen's University. Then Jayanne had an unusual post-doctoral fellowship at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI; 1998-2000). In addition to doing research, she coordinated the Hubble Heritage project and authored the Hubble Heritage website. Jayanne also contributed to the creation of Hubble Heritage color pictures of astronomical objects, sometimes taking on the role of main imagemaker (e.g. for the Crab Nebula and for the image of a Hickson Compact Group 87). Jayanne's research interests include the behaviour of gas in groups of galaxies that are interacting with each other, and the how mass and energy are exchanged between a galaxy's spiral disk and its halo. In particular she is obsessed with the I/CGPS data showing a mushroom-shaped cloud bursting more than 1000 light-years out of the plane of the Milky Way. The opportunities for producing astronomical images from HST and CGPS datasets in the last few years have distracted Jayanne from curating art shows and exhibiting her other artworks. However her cooking is still artistically delicious and adventurous. Another interest is bicycling, which she uses to try to minimize the effects of her cooking. |