Building Habitable Worlds: one-day symposium for early-career researchers

General event

Building Habitable Worlds: one-day symposium for early-career researchers

  • Event time: 9:30am
  • Event date: 21st February 2014

Event details

Are you interested in the potential for life on other planets? Could your research benefit from interdisciplinary input?

Registration is now open for the one-day ‘Building Habitable Worlds’ workshop. This unique event gives early-career scientists the opportunity to pitch their research interests and forge links across the sciences.

The deadline for registration is January 31st, 2014.

Preliminary schedule for the day.

Event description

What is life? How does it fit within the context of cosmic evolution, and how is it distributed in the Universe? Answering these questions requires an appreciation of the physical universe at all scales, from particle physics to planetary system formation; as well as a comprehensive understanding of biology- its origins, limits and evolution.

To encourage discussion of these inter-disciplinary problems, the UK Centre for Astrobiology, alongside the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance and the Astrobiology Society of Britain, will host a unique one day workshop ‘Building Habitable Worlds’. This aims to give early career scientists across all Astrobiology-related disciplines the opportunity to present their research and identify mutual goals in understanding the complexity of the universe and the position of life within it.

Workshop's main aims

  • Enable multi-disciplinary collaboration in astrobiology and related topics
  • Promote astrobiology amongst early career researchers
  • Help grow the academic community of scientists involved in astrobiology

Pitches and submissions

We invite PhD students and postdocs to present their research area and interests in short, five minute ‘pitches,’  These will be focussed summaries and could include descriptions of current research topics, plans for future work, an overview of your expertise or calls for collaborative input.

In addition, we invite the submission of abstracts for a poster presentation to take place during lunch and in the afternoon. The workshop will also include a structured break-out discussion to identify projects that could benefit from interdisciplinary collaborations.

Relevant topics include but are not limited to:

  • Detection of extrasolar planets
  • Origin, evolution and diversity of life on Earth
  • Behaviour of biomolecules under extreme conditions
  • Planetary system formation and the formation of habitable zones
  • Interaction of the biosphere with the lithosphere
  • Atmospheric and geologic biosignatures
  • Designing the minimal genome
  • Adaptation of organisms to extreme conditions and the limits of life
  • Prebiotic and early biotic chemistry
  • Omics and meta’omics technologies.
  • Planetary exploration

Participation is actively encouraged from researchers with little prior involvement in Astrobiology events.

Contact

habitableworlds [at] gmail.com

Further information

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