Leo Metcalfe
ESA Herschel SCI-SDH : HSCOM


Following a PhD at University College Dublin building a first 
generation LN-cooled CCD camera, I joined ESA as a Research Fellow
at ESTEC in 1986 working on IR He-cryogenic instrumentation. I
became ISO Calibration Scientist in 1988, then ISOCAM Instrument
Dedicated Team (CIDT) Leader before and during ISO operations, and
briefly ISO Project Scientist during ISO Post-Operations before
moving to XMM-Newton as Science Support Manager in July 2002. I 
joined the Herschel team as Science Operations Manager (HSCOM) on
September 1, 2007.

The main thrust of my research follows from theoretical papers on
gravitational lensing by galaxies published during my PhD years. In
the late 80's I proposed an ISO survey through gravitationally
lensing galaxy clusters as part of the ISO Central Programme. A
consortium was formed eventually involving
ESAC(VilSpa)/UCDublin/CEA-Saclay/Trieste and OMP-Toulouse to
accumulate sufficient observing time.  Using the amplification of
the background field generated by the foreground lensing clusters
it was possible to perform galaxy counts up to three times deeper
than those performed through general field surveys. This yielded
ISO's deepest observations.  In this way we could contribute
significantly to the identification of a population of dust
obscured star forming galaxies in the z range 0.5 to 1.5, with
important implications for models of galaxy formation and
evolution, and helping to resolve the sources of the Cosmic
Infrared Background.  Bruno Altieri was deeply involved in this
work.

Having used the galaxy clusters as "telescopes", it followed that
the properties of the clusters themselves could also be studied. In
a series of papers reporting the PhD work of Daniela Coia, the
incidence of dust-obscured and IR-bright star forming galaxies in
clusters has been examined showing that in many cases visual
bandpass estimates of star formation rates in galaxy clusters may
greatly underestimate the true cluster galaxy SFR.

The work extends now to explore the above, and related, themes
using data from the Spitzer Space Observatory.

Bruno Altieri, Daniela Coia, Ricardo Perez and Celia Sanchez are
deeply involved in the above research.