Users Committee | NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database

NED Users Committee (NUC)

The NED Users Committee (NUC) is a group of professional astronomers representing the diverse community of scientists who use the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) on a regular basis in their scientific research and teaching activities. The NUC serves as an independent and external advisory body, meeting periodically with the NED team to provide feedback on the evolving content and capabilities, and to suggest future directions and priorities.

Terms of reference and membership

The primary user base of NED consists of professors, research scientists, postdocs and graduate students who perform research on galaxies, active galactic nuclei, observational cosmology, or related topics, and who publish their results in peer-reviewed journal articles. Astronomers making use of data from past and current NASA astrophysics missions (e.g, IRAS, Spitzer, Hubble, Chandra, NuSTAR) and all-sky surveys (e.g., GALEX, 2MASS, WISE) along with complementary data from large ground-based sky surveys and data in the peer-reviewed literature, as joined across the EM spectrum within NED, are especially encouraged to serve on the NUC. Other terms:

You are a professional astronomer performing research in extragalactic astronomy or cosmology, as demonstrated by publications in the peer-reviewed literature.
You use NED extensively in your scientific research and/or teaching activities.
You have a strong interest in influencing the future direction of NED content and functionality to keep the services vital for your own research, but also to NASA and the research community.
You agree to participate in annual meetings, either in-person on the campus of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (travel expenses covered by NASA), or via teleconferencing.
You are willing to serve on the panel for 2 or more consecutive years.
You agree to collaborate with the Chair to provide constructive feedback and guidance to the NED team in reports produced annually and posted on the public NED website (below).

Reports

NUC recommendations are compiled in reports submitted to the NED Project Scientist and Task Lead (Dr. Joseph M. Mazzarella) and the IPAC Director (Dr. George Helou), and they are posted here: