On 24-25 May 2019, the 8th leadership meeting of the Young Minds Programme of the European Physical Society was held at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL), in Erlangen, Germany. This Leadership Meeting was organized by the hbar Omega student chapter and the Young Minds (YM) section of Erlangen, supported by MPL and funded by the European Physical Society (EPS), Europhysics Letters (EPL), International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS), The Optical Society (OSA), OHB Systems AG, and Erlangen Graduate School in Advanced Optical Technologies (SAOT).