18th EPS Young Minds Action Committee Meeting
The 18th EPS Young Minds Action Committee meeting took place in Trieste, northern Italy, on the 24th November 2018. The meeting was hosted by the local YM section, Science Industries (http://www.scienceindustries.eu/index.php/en/), and the local INAF (Italian National Astrophysics Institute) section.
All of the young committee members were present (Roberta Caruso, Enrique Sanchez, Araceli Venegas Gómez, Imran Khan and Giorgio Nocerino) along with the President of the EPS, Rüdiger Voss, and the EPS Project leader for YM activities, Ophélia Fornari.
Enrique Sanchez, who has been a member of the Action Committee since 2014, communicated his withdrawal from the committee. We sincerely thank Enrique for his passion and effort in the Young Minds project. He was notably, among other things, the main person responsible for the links between our project and other committees in the EPS: The Historic Site Committee and the Equal Opportunity Committee, where Araceli and Giorgio will replace him respectively.
During the meeting, two new members were elected as AC members, among a pool of high skilled applicants: we are happy to announce that both Dr. Darina Pesina (Junior Researcher at the IRE NASU Kharkiv Ukraine) and Dr. Richard Zeltner (Postdoc researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Erlangen, Germany) are already working for the good of the project.
As an established tradition, at the end of the last Leadership Meeting in Prague, last May, we invited all the Young Minds sections to apply to host the next Leadership Meeting. We are proud to announce that the next Leadership Meeting will be hosted by the hbar Omega Young Minds section in Erlangen, Germany.
On a more technical note, we discussed new ways to improve the communication with our sections, introducing a digital platform for the communication with local members and defining new rules for the social media management. Moreover, we worked on a modified grant regulation that will improve the impact and the visibility of our project. The biggest change is the introduction of a new grant scheme, the YMCA (Young Minds Conference Award), that will enable us to support our sections for the organisation of conferences (e.g. IONS) for students and early careerists and for the organisation of sessions dedicated to young professionals within larger conferences.
The beauty of the place played a major role in the meeting. The wonderful city of Trieste, with its historical buildings and the breath-taking view of the Adriatic Sea, and the historical site of the OATs (Astronomical Observatory) were a perfect set for our annual gathering. Furthermore, for the very first time in the EPS YM History, we had some members of the local section joining us for the meeting. Together, we had the chance to discuss both their section and the project as a whole. This led us to a new and fresh perspective so that new ideas could inspire our future activities. Indeed, as our project grows and spreads all over the continent, we are fully committed to enhance that sense of community that we strongly believe to be the pillar of this incredible network!
For further information about the EPS Young Minds project visit the EPS Young Minds website or the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/EPSYM/
