I'm very interested in Head of Research. Could be a fun position. Please forgive some formatting errors; I've yet to fully adjust to the new site.
Edit: Wow. I hadn't read the IOA Rep's bio until after I posted. Talk about a marvelous coincidence!
|Appearance: Fair-skinned and short of height with dark green, almost gray eyes. His hair is a thick dark brown, well-parted and short. He has dyed his temples gray (or perhaps his hair is prematurely gray and he's dyed the rest brown). He also sports a mustache and goatee. His face, with its strong jaw-line and generally rectangular shape, has a very few wrinkles, mainly on his brow.
|Name: Dr. Abel Ishpetyr
|Title: Doctor (awarded Sc. D. from the University of Cambridge for work in theoretical physics; PhD in Acoustics from the University of Cambridge)
|Role: Head of Research
|Unit: Research
|Age: 32
|Gender: Male
|Reason chosen for Tempest: Someone very high up "owed" him a favor; not that he's particularly unqualified, so it was no great loss for him to be assigned to the Tempest. The "official" reason cites his experience leading a team of researchers and his work in theoretical physics, not to mention that working with sub- and hyper- space comes incredibly naturally to him.
|Personality: A façade of pleasantness, smiles, and good manners. Behind the façade, he is manipulative and political. Very, very political. Every power, event and person is an opportunity to him. Mildly vindictive.
|Short Biography:
In truth, and as one of his greatest secrets, he never achieved a PhD in Acoustics. Dr. Ishpetyr came very close, but there was a girl involved. He made the mistake of pursuing her, rather than his degree. She dumped him, and then he realized his mistake. In desperation, Able got a "friend" to hack the records, gained leverage over a faculty member or two, and moved on with his life. Before he moved on, however, he carefully sowed the secrets of his former girlfriend amongst her colleagues, friends and family. She dropped out of university a month before completing her degree, and he never heard from her again.
His second greatest secret is that he never got over her, and is plagued with guilt at what he'd done. Occasionally he'll discreetly and anonymously make her life better; he's her "guardian angel".
Other than those juicy bits of unshared gossip, he studied abroad at MIT in the United States. He earned a dual Aerospace Engineering and Physics major with a minor in Mathematics after six years of difficult course work. For graduate school he (obviously) returned to his native England.
After earning his doctorate, Dr. Ishpetyr was the head of a research team studying the fluid, acoustic nature of spacetime. Several years into their research he very nearly independently discovered and confirmed the existence of subspace. However, funding mysteriously dried up before he could complete the study — a civilian hacking into subspace communications bands would be very bad for the Stargate program. Thus Abel's attention turned to the Stargate program.
He didn't know about it at first, of course. But the deeper he dug, the less sense things started to make. Tracking the financial status of research studies, a pattern began to emerge. Any research into spacetime seemed to halt prematurely — either the lead researchers would mysteriously change careers, funding would disappear, or some other small disaster occurred. And the more he dug, the more he found. Astronomical data, in particular, was either very poorly tracked or simply absent at times. A model revealed that the blurry "holes" in the data tracked across the sky and moved in an impossible manner. Certain recent projects and inventions had plenty of funds, but not enough personnel, or vice versa. Yet the advancements kept coming, apparently impervious to the pressures other projects felt.
So he called in a few favors, met the right people, found the right leverage, and finally ended up in a secure room being briefed about the Stargate program. Then he was "invited" to participate - a result he found very agreeable. After all, he figured, if such a massive secret was kept from the public, what secrets were they keeping from themselves?
The Americans, it turned out, were hiding something. Something involving a pattern in cosmic background radiation, a covered-up base codenamed "Icarus", a lost expedition to somewhere codenamed "Destiny", and a rather involved equation that he only caught bits and pieces of. It became his newest obsession, but he'd learned all he could whilst on Earth. So the Tempest seemed like a natural means to get closer to the mystery.
