Janet A. Mattei Research Fellow, Grant Foster

Arne Henden (AAVSO Director) with Grant Foster in front of AAVSO Headquarters

We are pleased to announce that the first Janet A. Mattei Research Fellow is Grant Foster. Grant is well-known to many of the AAVSO membership because he was a staff member at headquarters from 1989-1997. He is the author of many of our data analysis programs such as TS and WWZ. He also developed the CLEANEST algorithm and weighted wavelet Z-transform (WWZ).

Since working for the AAVSO, Grant has spent much of his time pursuing his musical career. Playing Irish music festivals and local venues whenever he has the chance, Grant plays guitar and sings Irish ballads. In honor of Janet, Grant performed at the Janet A. Mattei Memorial Service in November of 2004.

To earn his "real" money, however, Grant works on text categorization for Island Data Corporation based in San Diego where teaches computers how to classify natural language text. While he usually telecommutes from Portland, Maine, Grant moved to Boston for a two month sabbatical to maintain a close working relationship with HQ. His new wife, Laura, visited him whenever possible.

The purpose of the Janet A. Mattei Research Fellowship Program is to fund a scientist, postdoctoral researcher, or student to visit and perform research at AAVSO HQ using the AAVSO International Database and publish the results. The Program was established in 2004 in honor of the late Janet A. Mattei, Director of the AAVSO from 1973-2003. The program is currently half-way through its fundraising goal. (Contribute here)

During the summer Grant worked on the following projects:

• Worked with Arne Henden on the cepheid database, both looking at long-term secular period changes and studying TU Cas in detail. A paper has been written and will be submitted soon to a major journal. Once it has been approved for publication we will link to it on our home page.
• Worked with Aaron Price on studying SS Cyg supercycle properties and using WWZ to characterize quasiperiodic oscillations in BZ UMa outbursts. Papers are expected to be written in the coming months.

These are two plots from Foster's Cepheid paper. The first is a Fourier power spectrum of TU Cas using only Stanislaw Swierczynski's (SSW) data. The noise level is less than 0.03 magnitudes proving that careful and talented visual observers can make very precise and consistent observations.		The second is X Cyg with data from another talented visual observer, Wayne Lowder (LX). His observations are compared with photometric data from the McMaster Cepheid Database. Notice the amount of detail Lowder could detect, all which is confirmed by the photometric data!