Remembering Adair Payson Lane, Astronomy PhD '82

Adair Payson Lane, UMass Astronomy PhD 1982, passed away at her home in Centerville, MA, this February. Adair Lane was a graduate of Wellesley College (1970) and came to work as a research technician at UMass Amherst. She subsequently enrolled in the graduate program, where her research was in radio astronomy, and her supervisor was Nobel Laureate Joseph Taylor. After graduating, she had positions at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Boston University, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, doing research in radio astronomy and teaching at Boston University. While at the Center for Astrophysics, she played a leading role with the Antarctic Submillimeter Telescope and Remote Observatory (AST/RO), wintering over in Antarctica twice. Over her career, she authored or co-authored more than 100 articles and abstracts on planetary science, stellar masers, and the interstellar medium. Her early paper on the lunar albedo continues to be cited in current publications.