The Board of the EST Foundation has appointed Göran Scharmer, an astrophysicist with 40 years of experience in instrumental developments relevant to the design of EST, as Scientific and Technical Advisor to the Director of the EST Foundation.
Effective October 2024, Göran Scharmer, professor at Stockholm University, has been appointed as the Scientific and Technical Advisor to the Director of the EST Foundation (STAD). Among the responsibilities he will fulfil in this role, the most notable is the regular interaction with the Director of the Foundation on the scientific and technical progress of the EST project. To achieve that, Scharmer will maintain direct contact with the EST Science Advisory Group and the EST Project Office staff, enabling him to obtain up-to-date and accurate information on the project's status. Likewise, he is expected to provide the scientific and technical teams with valuable suggestions.
The Board's decision to offer the STAD position to Göran Scharmer is based on his unique experience in the development of telescopes, instrumentation, adaptive optics, and image reconstruction techniques. Throughout his professional career, Scharmer has made significant contributions to the field of solar physics, playing a key role in the development of advanced instrumentation for high-resolution solar observations. He developed three adaptive optics systems using a novel approach based on cross-correlation algorithms, as well as two of the most powerful and scientifically productive solar Fabry-Pérot spectrometers in the world (CRISP and CHROMIS). Additionally, he pioneered the use of phase-diversity image restoration techniques with solar data and developed real-time frame selection techniques to create the first-ever high-resolution solar movies from a ground-based solar telescope.
Göran Scharmer (Stockholms University). Scientific and Technical Advisor to the Director of the EST Foundation.
Göran Scharmer has served as the director of the Institute for Solar Physics (ISP), first associated with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and later with Stockholm University. During the decades he led the institute, he oversaw the development and operation of the Swedish Vacuum Solar Telescope (SVST) and the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope, two solar telescopes located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma (Spain). Both telescopes were developed with a very short lead time, at low cost, and delivered the expected performance from the very beginning.
Scharmer expresses his pleasure in seeing how the EST project is "developing its full potential both through the choice of a proven excellent site on La Palma, and in terms of an optical design that seeks to minimise the number of optical surfaces in order to maximise throughput and image quality”. He further states that he fully supports both the decisions made and the concepts adopted so far, which is why he is pleased to accept this new position. "This is a project that obviously is of fundamental importance to the future of European solar physics, and it needs the full support of the entire solar community", he adds.