[Astronomy] Royal Society discussion meeting

After the discussion meeting that I blogged about yesterday, I got on a bus with lots of other scientists and went to Chicheley Hall for the associated satellite meeting. This was titled "Characterising exoplanets: the next decade", and was an invitation only event. There were however some bursaries available to allow early career researchers to attend, which covered the cost of room, board, and transport. Bursaries were supposedly awarded to researchers who were going to be at the forefront of exoplanet research over the coming decade, so I was a little surprised to get one; my supervisor obviously wrote an excellent letter of recommendation!

In any case, there ended up being nine bursary students there. Some I'd met, and talked to, at the meeting in London, and they were all very friendly and approachable. We were all pretty excited to be there amongst some of the luminaries of the field, and looking forward to a bit more of an informal meeting, although we weren't sure exactly what the format was going to be.

This is the front of Chicheley Hall. Impressive isn't it? It's a gorgeous old stately home,

and a great venue for a meeting. (Credit: David Brown)

It turned out to be an absolutely brilliant couple of days. The format was very informal, and meant to stimulate free form discussion. There were four sessions per day, with a pair in the morning and a pair in the afternoon. Each pair had an overarching theme to them, and consisted of a few short talks followed by a long discussion section. The talks were designed to be somewhat provocative to stimulate discussion, and they certainly succeeded. What was great was that the discussion descended into anarchy on only a couple of occasions; the rest of the time the session chairs did a good job of making everyone stick to the 'hands in the air' rule.

I also liked the fact that there were range of different subjects being discussed, including several that wouldn't normally cross the path of early career researchers such as myself. There was a whole afternoon spent discussing ESA's upcoming deadlines for space-mission proposals, the process that we need to go through, and ideas for what we could propose. The politics involved, and factors that have to be taken into consideration, where not something that I'd ever thought about before. Similarly, there was a morning session that was partly turned over to representatives from industry, and I learnt quite a bit about the current state of detector and satellite technology (there were some truly impressive things presented).

This is the North Wing, where I was staying. All of the rooms are named after prominent

scientists, which is a nice touch. (Credit: David Brown)

But possibly the best bit was the chance to mingle with a wide variety of established researchers in an intimate, informal setting. Chicheley Hall only has rooms for about 50 people, so even though we'd filled all of the rooms it was still a small meeting. Everyone was very friendly and welcoming, and it certainly felt as though our (the bursary students') point of view was welcomed. Most of us couldn't contribute much until the final afternoon though, when we had a session on public outreach.

Chicheley Hall is a fantastic setting as well. The old stately home has been fully converted into a conference venue, with most of the main house, north wing, and south wing all converted into bedrooms. There's small library, a lounge, and a bar in which we spent a lot of time after dinner The conference venue itself is a separate building with a couple of meeting rooms in it, and was perfect for this type of conference. The unlimited tea and biscuits also helped to make it fun!

This is the lounge - rather nice isn't it. The decor of the whole house is like this (Credit: David Brown)

I had a great two days, and as with the London meeting it reinvigorated my desire to do astronomy research and get involved in the cutting edge of the field. I even learnt about a couple of postdoc positions that might be opening up in the near future, so it helped out with my job hunt too.