Pre-Doctoral Research Program

The program is jointly sponsored by the NRAO and by universities who wish their Ph.D. thesis students to have a concentrated exposure to research in radio astronomy, its instruments, or computational techniques under the supervision of an NRAO staff astronomer or engineer.

Examples of NRAO pre-doctoral researchers and their topics since 1990 are given here.

The program works as follows: with the consent of a student's academic department, the student comes to the NRAO to do thesis research under the supervision of an NRAO scientist or engineer. The duration of the appointment is flexible and may range from several months up to two years. The time spent at the NRAO need not be continuous.

Opportunities for participating in the pre-doctoral program are available at all three of the NRAO's main sites:

GBT	Green Bank, West Virginia which operates the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT), the world's largest fully steerable single-antenna radio telescope, a 100-meter class unblocked aperture for centimeter and long millimeter wavelengths,
EVLA	Socorro, New Mexico which operates the Expanded VLA (EVLA), a real-time 27-antenna aperture synthesis instrument for centimeter-wavelength imaging, polarimetry and spectrometry over baselines of tens of kilometers, and the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), an asynchronous aperture synthesis instrument that extends these techniques to baselines of thousands of kilometers,
ALMA	Charlottesville, Virginia which hosts the North American ALMA Science Center, supporting science use of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) by North American astronomers, and the NRAO Technology Center, an engineering laboratory for the design and development of advanced instrumentation for centimeter and millimeter wavelengths - including antenna elements, low-noise detectors, mixers, amplifiers, integrated receiver packages and advanced digital processors for ALMA, for the EVLA, the VLBA, the GBT, and other instruments at the forefront of radio astronomy.

To be eligible for the NRAO pre-doctoral research program a student must first:

• Complete all university course requirements so that only the thesis research is needed as an academic requirement for the Ph.D. degree;
• Obtain the consent of his or her thesis advisor and of the chairman of the academic department to participate in the NRAO pre-doctoral research program;
• Contact, or ask the thesis advisor to contact, an NRAO staff member who is willing to serve as thesis co-advisor and as local supervisor of the student's research program.

The student must then request to participate in the NRAO program by contacting the program administrator listed below, who will require:

• A letter from the student's academic advisor and/or the proposed NRAO staff co-advisor nominating the student for a pre-doctoral appointment
• A Curriculum Vitae and a statement of proposed research plans from the student.

There is no fixed application deadline for the NRAO pre-doctoral research program. Applications can be made and accepted throughout the year.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.