Our Mission
Our Story
Let's chat a bit...
Our team is composed of 7 fearless, wonderful, and smart female leaders. We are a mixture of early career scientists coming from different science disciplines, academic institutes, career levels, nationalities, and ethnicities. We all love astrobiology and share a common vision to advocate and achieve inclusive, diverse, equitable, accessible (IDEA) within the astrobiology field.
How to achieve IDEA in a virtual conference? We thought about this question deeply.
We DON'T WANT another virtual seminar anymore.
We WANT a chance to advocate our research and develop important skills, an active learning experience to expand our knowledge, and an opportunity to engage with peer scientists and establish networks.
Therefore, we shortened the talks, implanted enough breaks, and mixed different presentation formats in order to gather your attention and arouse your interests. We planned science discussion across many different topics. We asked for >=1 interactive tool (e.g., polls) in each presentation. We valued the interactive functions in the platform we selected.
We DON'T WANT isolation anymore.
We WANT a community that provides long-time support.
Therefore, we designed ABGRADCON22 • SOCIAL, a safe space that allows attendees to make connections by proposing stress-free social activities. There will be no required attendance. But things like virtual cooking, movie night, happy hours, book club are all welcome. We are going to continue using discord, a community space that unites all AbGradCon attendees from all years together.
We DON'T WANT to be passive followers anymore.
We WANT to actively shape the future of astrobiology field and let it become inclusive, diverse, equitable, and accessible for future astrobiologists from the globe.
Therefore, we will provide two science sessions per day and 24 hour access to social platform. We recognized the needs of professional developments such as career path and communication skills, as well as important topics such as achieving IDEA within astrobiology and the future of astrobiology. We designed panels and small group discussions to allow you speak your thoughts to your peers and senior level astrobiologists.
We welcome any suggestions from the community as we prepare for this conference in order to make it amazing!