Asteroseismology made in Iberia
The 8th Iberian Meeting on Asteroseismology — Laying the groundwork for the road ahead took place this week, gathering online 72 registered participants from Iberia and beyond. I had the pleasure of sharing the Scientific Organizing Committee with my colleagues Aldo Serenelli, Andy Moya, Antonio García Hernández, Javier Pascual Granado, and Savita Mathur. The Local Organizing Committee was impeccably run by Diego Bossini, Morgan Deal, and Manuel Monteiro.
Following the successful reinstallment last year of the Iberian Meeting on Asteroseismology series, we gave continuity to this series by welcoming to this meeting the Iberian community and its diaspora — as well as some of our international collaborators — working on asteroseismology and related fields. This was a place to foster new collaborations and consolidate existing ones, discuss the challenges lying ahead, and find new, joint funding opportunities. With that in mind, we put together a rich and multifaceted program, on which I’ll say a few words.
As much as we would all have loved meeting in person, a decision had to be made last June regarding the meeting format, and that decision was invariably going to be to host an online event. An online event of course ends up removing much of the informal and laid-back nature typical of past meetings in the series, as it imposes a more rigid schedule and proceedings. But we have nonetheless tried to compensate for that with what has been a very amusing social event in Gather.town and ample time for discussion.
The science program was indeed multifaceted. At its core were a series of hands-on projects (7 in total). Hands-on projects took the form of either (i) self-contained, focused projects, (ii) the continuation of an ongoing project, (iii) or simply the exploitation of a novel idea. Meeting participants were free to join any project of their choice and, to guarantee that projects would run smoothly, we have created dedicated Zoom rooms, Slack channels, and cloud storage.
We had two different types of talks during the meeting. During the opening session, we heard about the several institutes across Iberia where asteroseismology has a strong presence. Spread over the following three days, we had a number of talks (14) by young scientists. The rationale for this had to do with the pandemic and the increasing difficulty faced by young scientists in getting their work noticed by the community. We have thus decided to give them this opportunity.
Finally, we closed the meeting with a discussion on funding opportunities and a round table on a possible future joint application to Horizon Europe. The purpose of this round table was to sound out the community, identify the right funding opportunity(ies), and broadly identify the science case, with the aim of formalizing our intents during the next Iberian meeting, where we will hopefully meet in person.
See you next year in the Canary Islands for the 9th Imas!
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