Natasa Boric is coming from Belgrade. She is working on the study of neutral hydrogen in the radio galaxy NGC 315 and her supervisor is Raffaella Morganti at ASTRON. She has been busy reducing data taken with the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope and the Very Large Array. From these data, two HI absorbing systems are seen in this galaxy. The aim of the project is to study the characteristics of the gas producing the absorption and understand its origin and whether it can be, at least partly, associated with a circumnuclear disk.

Ann Marie Cody is a student from the U.S., where she just completed her third year as an undergraduate in astronomy (at Harvard University). This summer, she is glad to have the opportunity to expand her interest in radio astronomy through an ASTRON studentship. With the guidance of her advisor Robert Braun, she is reducing and analyzing several WSRT observations of high-redshift galaxies, in efforts to detect OH absorption.

Georgina Coldwell comes from Argentina where she is in her first year of her PhD. She is working on two interrelated projects, both based on the observations conducted with the VLBI Space Observatory Programme (VSOP) under supervision by Zsolt Paragi and Leonid Gurvits (VSOP). In one of these projects a sample of high-redshift quasars was observed at 5 and 1.6 GHz with an angular resolution unavaiable in ground-based observations. In the other part of her work Georgina participates in the collective effort of reducing the data of the VSOP Survey Programme. In both studies, good progress has been achieved and will lead to continuation of the work after completion of the Summer Programme.

Gyula Jozsa is coming from the Radioastronomisches Institut der Universitaet Bonn (RAIUB) where he just began his PhD studies. To get a good start, he applied for the Summer Studentship at Astron, where he is supervised by Tom Oosterloo. He is working on two projects. Using HI data he is deriving the rotation curves of the two dust-lane early-type galaxies ESO 510-13 and NGC 3108. For the latter, long-slit optical spectra are also used. This will allow to constrain the dark matter distribution in these galaxies, as it has been done for spiral galaxies before. In a second project he will derive an HI datacube of the polar ring galaxy NGC 2685 using WSRT data. These data will allow him to model the extreme warp in this galaxy.

Francesca Stefanachi comes from Italy; her home institute is the Institute of Radioastronomy of the National Research Council (C.N.R.) in Bologna. As summer student at JIVE, she is working with Mike Garrett and Cormac Reynolds on the FIR-Radio correlation and the polarisation VLBA observations of BL Lac Objects. For the first project, the aim is to extend the FIR-Radio correlation to z>1 and verify whether this well known correlation holds at such high redshifts. To do this, she is constructing a sample of objects with well known spectroscopic redshifts, radio and far/mid infrared observations. The sample includes some AGN objects to investigate whether it is possible to distinguish between sources powered by AGN and star formation processes at high redshifts, as happens for local and moderate redshift sources. For the second project, she is concentrating on the source 1803+784, and the idea is to study the rotation measure in this object and use this to investigate the intrinsic gas content, thus providing key information about the origin of the weakness of the optical line emission in BL Lacs.