[GEM] THE GEM MESSENGER, Volume 28, Number 64

[Newsletter Editor]

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     THE GEM MESSENGER
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Volume 28, Number 64
Dec.27,2018

Announcement submission website: http://aten.igpp.ucla.edu/gem/messenger_form/

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Table of Contents

1. Message From the Chair: Seasons Greetings and Happy New Year!

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1. Message From the Chair: Seasons Greetings and Happy New Year!
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From: Jacob Bortnik on behalf of the GEM Steering Committee (jbortnik at atmos.ucla.edu)

Dear GEM friends and colleagues,

I’d like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a joyful and festive holiday season, and a wonderful new year ahead!  

Looking back on the past year, there is much to be grateful for!  We’ve had another successful GEM summer workshop, held in sunny Santa Fe over the week of 17-23 June 2018.  The workshop was attended by a record 297 participants, 73 of whom were students.  The registration surpassed last year’s total by 68  (an increase of 30%), and represented 30 institutions and 12 different countries spanning 4 continents.  This year the GEM meeting was coordinated with the CEDAR meeting, and had a CEDAR-GEM overlap day on Saturday 23rd June.  This arrangement proved to be very effective, and was attended by 128 people, representing a large fraction of both CEDAR and GEM communities. 

With a renewed emphasis on workshop-style sessions (based on last year’s poll results) we saw a large number of Focus Group leaders include diversified elements into their line-ups including discussions and panel sessions.  Two of our GEM plenaries were presented in a panel format, and one plenary speaker gets a tip of the hat for presenting his talk entirely online (possibly for the first time in GEM history).  We also held a special plenary session dealing with microagressions in the workplace, which was well received and widely discussed afterwards.  

In the recent mini-GEM meeting, held on the Sunday before AGU (December 9th), the GEM Steering Committee met to discuss a number of key items which included the selection of new Focus Groups (FG’s) for the 2019-2023 period.  We congratulate the two new selected FG’s entitled: (i) “System understanding of radiation belt particle dynamics through multi-spacecraft and ground-based observations and modeling” led by Hong Zhao, Lauren Blum, Sasha Ukhorskiy, and Xiangrong Fu, and (ii) “Particle heating and thermalization in collisionless shocks in the MMS era”, led by Lynn Wilson III, Li-Jen Chen, Katherine Goodrich, and Ivan Vasko.  We also thank the chairs of the recently-concluded FG’s, for your leadership and service to the GEM community over the past five years. 

Looking ahead, we are excited for the 2019 GEM summer workshop which will take place over the week of June 23-28, 2019, and will be held at the La Fonda Hotel, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  As in 2018, the GEM summer workshop will be coordinated with the CEDAR workshop (which will take place over the week of June 16-21 2019), with a CEDAR-GEM overlap day held at the La Fonda hotel on Saturday, June 22nd.  Bear in mind that we will be piloting a new program offering limited support for “family care grants”, intended to help offset the cost of childcare, though recipients will be responsible for arranging their own childcare.  More details will follow in subsequent announcements.

This continues to be a time of excitement and reinvigoration in the magnetospheric and heliospheric communities.  Funding in our field has been substantially increased and many new opportunities have become available recently, including NASA’s DRIVE science centers, and NSF’s 10 Big Ideas, several of which are highly relevant to the GEM community.   We encourage the GEM community to “think big thinks”, innovate, take full advantage of all the opportunities that the present time has to offer, and remember to communicate the excitement and relevance of our science to the broader public.

Best wishes for the New Year, and we look forward to seeing you at the 2019 GEM summer workshop in Santa Fe!


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The Geospace Environment Modeling (GEM) program is sponsored by the Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences (AGS) of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

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