Image ©2016 Daniel Lopez

The Liverpool Telescope team are looking for expressions of interest from researchers who would be interested in joining our Time Allocation Group.

We receive operations funding from STFC and in return we offer telescope time to UK applicants through the Panel for Allocation of Telescope Time (PATT) process. The Time Allocation Group (TAG) is responsible for reading and ranking the proposals received at each semesterly call, and can also provide advice to the telescope management team to improve the scientific productivity of the telescope.

The TAG consists of 5 members, and the typical term of a panel member is 3 years (6 semesters). A typical semester might see ~50 proposals submitted. Panel members will read the proposals and provide a preliminary mark for each. They will be supported by expert external reviews on the scientific and technical cases. A time allocation meeting is then held in which each proposal is discussed and the final ranking is determined. The meeting typically takes ~4 hours and is conducted remotely. Following the meeting panel members will write a few lines of feedback for a subset of the proposals. Outside of the meetings, they will also be occasionally called upon to provide some brief comments (via email) on any proposals received via our 'Reactive' route for rapid reaction, target-of-opportunity science.

The TAG is a hugely important part of ensuring that the best science is carried out by our user community, and we hope it is an interesting and rewarding experience for the members of the panel. We would welcome an expression of interest from anyone who would be interested in taking part. Ideally you would have some experience within time domain science, since the majority of our proposals are in this area (transients, AGN, variable stars and binaries, exoplanets, Solar System objects...). We aim to ensure that the composition of our TAG reflects our diverse user community. Interest from postgraduate students and early career researchers, who may benefit from gaining an insight into the time allocation process on large facilities, is very welcome.

Any enquiries or expressions of interest should be sent to Chris Copperwheat at C.M.Copperwheat@ljmu.ac.uk.