William Wall:
CLASS OF 1979
Niagara District High SchoolClass of 1979
Niagara-on-the-lake, ON
University of TorontoClass of 1983
Toronto, ON
Parliament Oak Public SchoolClass of 1974
Niagara-on-the-lake, ON
Queen Mary SchoolClass of 1973
St. catharines, ON
Alexandra Elementary SchoolClass of 1972
St. catharines, ON
William's Story
Life
August, 2000 ---
One day I'll get off my duff and make my
own web page. Until then I'll try to
squeeze my last twenty years into the
2000-character limit. (And I hope that
many of you do the same.)
I'm a millimetre-wave astronomer,
which means that I observe the heavens
at high radio frequencies (about 1000
times higher than on your FM dial) to
observe the interstellar clouds of
molecular hydrogen in which stars form.
I received my BSc from UToronto, my MSc
from UBC, and my PhD from UTexas. When
finishing my MSc I met another UBC
student, Mihae Lee, who later became my
wife in 1987. She gave birth to our son
Dylan in 1991, at the same time I was
giving birth to my PhD Dissertation (talk
about timing). After that we lived in
Maryland where I held a postdoctoral
fellowship at NASA/GSFC.
Since 1994, I've been a researcher at
the National Institute of Astrophysics,
Optics, and Electronics (INAOE) in
Tonantzintla, Puebla, Mexico, where I'm
playing a part in the Large Millimetre-wave
Telescope (LMT) project. This is a project
to build the largest filled-aperture antenna
(50m diameter) in the world that can observe
at wavelengths as short as 1 mm. This is the
largest scientific project in modern Mexican
history.
In 1996 my daughter, Narissa, was born
in Puebla, Mexico. She is the only one of
the four of us that is Mexican and the only
one, so far, that does not really speak
Spanish.
September, 2007 ---
It has been 7 years since the previous
(and first) instalment of this bio. My son,
Dylan, i...Expand for more
s now 16 and my daughter, Narissa
(Narly), is now 11. Dylan is showing a
real talent for computer graphics. It will
probably be his career one day. He is also
heavily into (addicted to) on-line video games
like WOW. Narly is surprisingly intelligent,
precocious, friendly, talkative, and
multi-talented. And yes, she speaks Spanish
now, probably better than the rest of us,
except maybe Dylan. Narly is into dance,
sketching, painting, chatting on-line,
volleyball and ... the list goes on. My kids
certainly did not inherit their artistic
inclinations from me, but probably from their
mother. Speaking of whom, Mihae likes working
with stained glass, painting, and surfing the
internet. She especially likes downloading
nifty stuff that she finds.
As for me, life goes on ... The LMT
construction is largely finished. The
telescope is now in the commissioning
phase - that is, being prepared for
full-time observations. This means getting
the telescope working to spec. First-light
should be in late 2008. While that is going
on, I've been busy with my research. Recently,
I published a few papers on a different method
for diagnosing the physical conditions in
interstellar molecular clouds. These impact
on a common method for estimating the masses
of molecular clouds. That method has never
been explained adequately; I've managed to
close that gap a bit.
Other than that boring professional stuff,
I've been passing the time playing with kids
(tennis, volleyball, aerobee) and swimming with
them too.
Feel free to reach me at wwall at inaoep dot mx.
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