Kelty retirement reception is Dec. 18 (full announcement)

Photo Credit: Bob Kelty
Fri, 12/11/2015 - 08:16

A retirement reception for John (Bob) Kelty will be held from 2 to 4 p.m. Dec. 18 in 149 Jorgensen Hall. A presentation is scheduled for 2:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Kelty, Electronic Shop Manager for the Department of Physics and Astronomy, is retiring after 36 years at UNL. He received his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in Electrical Engineering from UNL.

In his initial years with the Department, most Electronics Shop work entailed design, construction, and repair of specialized electronic components. The advent of the personal computer brought huge changes to the role of the Electronics Shop, and now a large share of the work involves repair and updating of computer hardware and software and interfacing computers to experiments. As Electronics Shop Manager, Kelty ably led the Department through these tremendous changes. He also taught Electrical and Electronics Circuits to physics undergraduates for many years.

Kelty conducted research in polar ice sampling probes, including updating borehole logging systems with microprocessors and logging the deep boreholes in the Antarctic and Greenland. He developed an ice sampling melting probe for Arctic and Antarctic ice sheet study and was a coinvestigator for the Snow and Ice Research Group (SIRG) proposal to the NASA Earth Science and Applications Division. His work in this area led to a number of peer-reviewed publications, including a Physical Review Letter.

Most recently, Kelty has been involved in the Phase-I upgrades for the CMS experiment which is located at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. He played a leading role in commissioning the wire bonding for the module fabrication used in the pixel upgrades. He also designed boards, now used by the USCMS pixel labs, for the manufacturing tests, equipment tests, and calibration of the pixel upgrade.

He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society.