Farewell Franz (kind of...)

© ASTRON

Dr. Franz Kirsten is leaving ASTRON per December 1st, 2022, to take up a permanent position as a Senior Research Engineer at Chalmers University of Technology. Franz worked with us for the past years as part of the AstroFlash team. In particular, Franz led our PRECISE project to pinpoint the positions of repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs) using the European VLBI Network (EVN) as well as high-cadence monitoring of FRBs using the individual dishes.

This has been enormously fun and successful, leading to some high-impact papers like the discovery of bright bursts from the Galactic magnetar SGR 1935+2154 (Kirsten et al. 2021) and the localisation of one repeater to a surprising globular cluster host (Kirsten et al. 2022).

There are more cool and exciting results soon to be submitted and in the pipeline, so we're very happy to Franz will still be collaborating with AstroFlash in the coming years, and hopefully visit ASTRON soon again. While at ASTRON, Franz worked remotely from Sweden, but he visited several times for our now traditional "Happy Franz Weeks" and was always a short step away on Zoom (as can be seen in the picture above).