Management Group
The Management Group represents all MSE participants and is responsible for all high-level decisions and the strategic direction of the MSE project. The Management Group appoints the Science Advisory Group from which they solicit science guidance. The Project Spokesperson reports directly to the Management Group and is their representative within the international astronomical community, working on all aspects of partnership engagement.
A formal governance agreement for the preliminary design phase is under development as a Statement of Understanding between the participants. Once the Statement of Understanding is enacted, the Management Group will be replaced with the MSE Board. The Statement of Understanding empowers the new MSE Board to set the project directions for the preliminary design phase and define the formal partnership agreement for later stages including full science operations.
Andy Sheinis
Project Spokesperson
Andy Sheinis joins the MSE Project Office as the MSE Program Director as of January 1 2023. He was formerly the interim Executive Director for Canada France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) where he previously served as the Director of Engineering since returning to Hawaii. Prior to CFHT, Andy was the Head of Instrumentation at the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO) where he was Project leader for the Hermes spectrograph at AAT, the GHOST spectrograph for Gemini Observatory as well as the 4MOST fiber positioner that AAO built for ESO. Furthermore, he was one of two Australian representatives on the Science Advisory Committee for the Giant Magellan Telescope. He also held an adjunct appointment as an Associate Professor at University of Sydney and prior to that, he was on the faculty at University of Wisconsin in Madison where he was PI for the Robert Stobie NIR Spectrograph for the SALT telescope.
Andy holds a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics from University of California Santa Cruz, is a fellow of the Astronomical Society of Australia, has seven US patents, over 95 publications and 2200 citations. He is the instructor for the SPIE course “Introduction to Visible and NIR Spectrograph Design and Development for Astronomy (SC906)” and recently wrote the chapter on Medium Resolution Spectrographs for the Volume 3 of the WSPC Handbook of Astronomical Instrumentation. He started his career in Hawaii more than 30 years ago as a senior engineer working for the UH Institute for Astronomy , where he led the site survey for the AEOS telescope on Maui.