This award will provide support for attendees and invited speakers for the tenth annual symposium of the NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship (AAPF) program, to be held in Austin, TX on January 7-8, 2012. The purpose of the AAPF program is to integrate research and educational activities at the postdoctoral level, to better prepare the fellows for a scientific career. The Annual Symposium provides a venue for fellows to discuss their research and teaching or outreach projects while increasing their exposure within the astronomy and astrophysics community. The symposium represents a key component of the AAPF program, acting as a mechanism to facilitate knowledge transfer from experiences the fellows have obtained in the course of their activities to a broad audience.
As with the previous symposia in this series, the AAPF symposium for 2012 will promote interactions among astronomers with very different interests and backgrounds. By creating a forum in which discussions can occur across the standard boundaries defined by sub-discipline, there is great opportunity for new insights and the ability to develop new interdisciplinary collaborations. The symposium will also provide a venue for discussing other issues that are important to early career astronomers. In addition, the symposium will (1) provide a forum for discussing the combination of research and teaching, (2) facilitate collaborations between AAPF fellows on both research and education, and (3) provide exposure for the fellows and the fellowship program within the astronomical community.
On January 7th and 8th, 2012, the NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship held its annual symposium to display scientific outcomes from the fellows’ research as well as listen to invited keynote speakers and participate in panel discussions on career and education-related topics. The goals of the symposium were to learn from each other’s broad range of scientific knowledge, foster collaboration, and encourage interdisciplinary interactions. All members of the astronomical community were invited and many attended. Eighteen fellows gave fifteen-minute presentations on the science that they achieved in the previous year. The talks were organized into topical sessions ranging from the Sun and searches for planets around distant stars, to the structure of the Milky Way Galaxy and how stars form within it. There were also talks about the Universe beyond the Galaxy, including the growth of supermassive black holes and the cosmology of the Universe itself. The invited science keynote speaker was Professor Mike Brown from the California Institute of Technology, who took the audience through a tour of the outer regions of our solar system and the strange icy objects that he has discovered. Another major goal of the NSF AAPF symposium was to address the broader impacts of the education and public outreach performed by the fellows and offer insights into career development through discussion panels. Two career-related panels discussed negotiating a job offer and provided advice on successful grant writing. There was also a panel discussion on interactive teaching methods for undergraduate astronomy educators. During all the panels, participants and audience members were encouraged to ask questions. The invited education and public outreach keynote speaker was Dr. Chris Lintott of Oxford University, who leads the citizen science endeavor of Galaxy Zoo.
