To: Daniel Altschuler

From: Edgar Castro

Date: January 30, 2002

Subject: New personnel recommendations

After reviewing many applications from engineers and technicians and after interviewing several, our engineering group recommends hiring the following three persons:

Calixto Rodriguez, PE

He graduated from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez campus in May 1987. He has worked mostly in the area of communications: fiber optics (terrestrial and undersea) as a project engineer and also as a manager. He once taught basic ac and dc circuits and op amps for a year at Interamerican University's Bayamon campus. At the present, he is a patent examiner at the U.S. Patent Office in Washington DC, but, for family reasons must move back to Puerto Rico. He is eager to work at the observatory and agrees to stay at least two years. As a licensed engineer, he has passed the engineering fundamentals examination as well as the professional electrical engineering examination (which contains problems at exactly the level we would use, if we could test applicants). I recommend that he be hired as an Electronics Engineer II. He will be assigned to the receiver group, but will participate in other projects.

Giacomo Comes , passed the Italian PE exam with a score of 130/140 in 1993.

Giacomo's professional experience has been as integrated circuit designer. He is familiar with many computer aided design systems, and could work immediately on either custom or gate array designs. His university course work covered the gamut of electrical engineering, so we could assign him to begin in any of our areas. I recommend that he be hired as an Electronics Engineer I, initially for 20 hrs/week: He will be working developing back-ends with Bill Sisk. He will also work on the maintenance of the VLBA recording system.

Carlos Rios

Carlos worked in the Electronics Department from January 2000 to May 2000 as part of his B.S. degree program in Electronic Engineering Technology at Interamerican University. He is currently a technician at HP in Ramey, where he does maintenance work on the production lines for ink jet printer cartridges. He also installs and programs new sensors and production equipment. I recommend hiring him as a Technician II. He will be assigned to the support group. We will train him to work with wire wrapping and surface mount technology.