Dear Students, Staff, and Faculty,
On behalf of Georgia Tech Astrobiology and the ExplOrigins early career group, we invite you to submit an abstract for the 2020 Exploration and Origins Colloquium which kicks off with a poster session on Monday January 27th, and continues with a day of plenary lectures, contributed talks, and a breakout networking session on Tuesday, January 28th. This interdisciplinary colloquium will highlight space exploration science and biological, geological, and astronomical origins research going on at the Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as neighboring universities. The goals of the colloquium are to forge relationships between diverse individuals, encourage collaboration and interdisciplinary understanding, and kick-start future fundable projects requiring the skills and expertise of multi-lab teams.
For registration and abstract submission, we ask that you complete this form by January 7th.
Announcement of selected speakers and poster presentations will be made on January 10th.
As previously, the colloquium will be split into two mutually inclusive sections: Exploration and Origins. While outlines of the two sections are provided below, the scope of abstracts considered will be broad. Past submissions have come from departments across the sciences and engineering. We emphasize that all interested parties are welcome regardless of discipline or affiliation.
Exploration: For the Exploration session, we are particularly interested in submissions that deal with any and all aspects of reaching beyond to explore the nature of diverse environments. Examples include space technology development, spacecraft mission design, planetary science modeling, biological or ecological fieldwork and direct observations of extrasolar systems; in short, discovering what is ‘out there’, wherever ‘there’ is.
Origins: Whether the origins of some aspect of life’s current function, the progenitors of planetary cycles, or the distribution of physical, chemical, and geologic processes that contributed to the origin of life, submissions for the Origins session should include some aspect of reaching back to understand some aspect of the world today. Examples include the origins of life itself, the emergence of multicellularity, the evolution of minerals, complex chemistry, atmospheres, and biological molecules or processes, and the formation of planetary systems.
If you have any questions regarding the abstract submission process, please email the conference organizers at info.gt.astrob.colloq@gmail.com. Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
The organizing committee Aaron Pital, Chase Chivers, Christina Buffo, Tyler Roche, Rebecca Guth-Metzler, Taylor Plattner, and Micah Schaible