Dear CLAS Collaboration Member:

     The time for the election of the new chair of the CLAS
collaboration is upon us. The members that have been nominated
are Hall Crannell, Steve Dytman, and Bill Hersman. Each member has
written a short biography addressing the following questions.
(1) What has been your involvement in the CLAS? (2) What projects 
are you involved in now? (3) What management experience do you 
have that would be relevant for the CLAS chair? Their 
responses are below. Voting by e-mail is now open. Please send
your votes to gilfoyle@cebaf.gov. You can also vote at the
Collaboration meeting, April 30-May 1.

Cheers,

        Jerry Gilfoyle     Gail Dodge


Hall Crannell

     I was a member of the committee that drew up the first 
CLAS charter and I have been involved  in the development
of the photon beam line, including the tagger, its associated
detector system and the beam dump for the tagger electron beam.
 Our major interest at present is to use photons to study 
strangeness production, initially from the nucleons and then from 
light nuclei.  An early extension of this work will be to use 
circularly polarized photons to look at double polarization variables 
in lambda and sigma production.  As soon as a polarized target 
becomes available we will start a program using circularly polarized 
photons to study the Gerasimov-Drell-Hearn sum rule.  We are also 
involved in two other studies:  photofission of heavy nuclei and 
neutral decays of the phi. I have served two different 3 year terms as 
department chair, program director at NSF for two years, Chair of 
the Bates Users group, 1972-73, Chair of the CEBAF Users Group, 1984-85, 
and member of the Board of Directors of these organizations.

Steven Dytman

     CLAS has been a major part of my research program since 1988.  
Region 1 was built in Pittsburgh by my group and CMU with most of 
the construction done at Univ. of Pittsburgh. We had an average 
of about 16 people at Pitt working on various aspects of the 
detector over 2 years.  My research now is almost totally 
associated with CLAS, including N* experiments and a new 
experiment with polarized photons. I have also been heavily 
involved with a theory project to develop a code to extract 
gamma-N-N* coupling constants from data. Before CLAS, I almost 
always worked on experiments with larger groups and a heavy 
development effort at LAMPF, Brookhaven, Bates, and IUCF.  I have 
been chairman of the Bates users' group and coordinator of the 
CLAS Structure of the Nucleon working group.

Bill Hersman

     Bill Hersman graduated from MIT in 1982, leaving for New 
Hampshire, where he joined the faculty in 1984.  He joined the 
CLAS collaboration  in 1988.  He  served as Chairman of the Nuclear 
Multihadron Reactions Physics Working  group for three years, 
acting as moderator in the synthesis of six multihadron proposals 
into a unified program.  His group fabricated the Forward Angle 
Time of Flight system and the Large Angle Time of Flight system. 
At the MIT-Bates Laboratory he proposed the BLAST  detector for 
internal target physics, leading a collaboration of 10 institutions
and 60 physicists.
     As the CLAS is commissioned, the Collaboration will be in 
transition.  As publications emerge, talks  are invited, and thesis 
assigned, the  interests of members with large investments should be 
preserved, without jeopardizing continuing growth, ideas, and energy 
offered by new members. A pro-active Coordinating Committee can work 
to gain the maximum benefit for all.