My name is pronounced in English "Salina" - the Greek spelling reflects my lifelong affinity with our sublimely beautiful Moon - and i am a multicellular squidgy female organism working as a researcher for the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, based in Berlin with professional links to an Australian Developer of precision, autonomous spectroscopes designed to bring spectroscopy out of the specialist laboratory into the hands of any intelligent farmer. Current rates of biosphere liquidation foretold by, amongst others, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization show that we desperately need to minimize our impact on our arable soils, and that is why i turn my theoretical mind - originally trained in quite a different background - to my main professional interest of spectroscope development - with the particular aims of extreme miniaturization, ruggedization and usage simplification for the user without loss of spectral resolution, throughput (maximum étendue) and precision.

As a physicist i am primarily a theoretician, but also skilled at experimental design as well as the practical manufacture of optical systems. As a theoretician, I am interested mainly in Geometry (GTR in physics) and Topology, have a particular bent for Lie Theory, and am exploring Epistemology in Science. I am also interested in education, particularly of the very young, and in the defense of their future: the Chief Scientist of the land of my birth (Australia) - one of the few wise people there - has pointed described humanity as losing the battle against global warming.

My current profile picture is of Glinda, the Witch of the South, reading her Great Book of Records, as conceived by L. Frank Baum. Isn't she adorable? She can track every event in the World through this book from the moment it happens - a thoroughly Laplacian idea. I find this strangely potentially apposite to modern physics - perhaps Einselection and other similar ideas broadly classed under the "Decoherence Programme" can explain the measurement problem as emerging from an utterly unitarily evolving quantum state of the Universe, leading to a description of the World that is, ultimately, uncannily Laplacian. See this lovely explanation by one of our site's best contributing users, Daniel Sank.