The director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory will be visiting West Virginia University next week.

Fred K.Y. Lo will be a guest of the Department of Physics, housed in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, and will give a lecture for the general public Wednesday, Sept. 15, at 8 p.m. in Room G24 of Eisland Hall. The lecture,The Invisible Universe,will highlight some of the remarkable discoveries made by radio telescopes and the future possibilities of new radio telescopes now under development.

Dr. Lo received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974. As a graduate student, he made many trips to the Green Bank Telescope in Pocahontas County, about 25 miles north of Marlinton. That older telescope has now been replaced by the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, the worlds largest fully steerable radio telescope.

As director of the NRAO , headquartered in Charlottesville, Va., Lo now oversees the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, as well as the Very Large Array (27 telescopes in Socorro, N.M.), and the Very Long Baseline Array (10 telescopes spread from the Virgin Islands to Hawaii). He manages the U.S. contribution to the Altacama Large Millimeter Array of 64 telescopes to be built in the Altacama Desert of Chile.

Lo previously served on the physics faculty at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley. In 1986, he became professor of astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and later was chair of the Astronomy Department there. In 1998, he moved to Taiwan to become director of the Instititute of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Academia Sinica. After four years he returned to the U.S. to become the director and senior scientist for the NRAO .

Rudolph P. Almasy, interim dean of the Eberly College, remarked:It is exciting to host the Director of the NRAO and strengthen WVU ’s ties to the Green Bank facility.

The Department of Physics offers a wide variety of research areas for undergraduate and graduate study. For more information concerning the Department of Physics, visithttp://www.as.wvu.edu/phys or call 304-293-3422.