- All right, and if not, Tiffany I will also give you a pre-warning of two minutes before the end of your 12 minutes' talk, okay, thank you. - Great, sounds good. - Yeah, Tiffany will tell us about the ExoExplorer Program. - Sorry, I keep turning around 'cause it sounds vaguely like construction in the background so apology if any, you know, sound leaks through, but I guess that's the reality that we live in today. Anyway, it's my pleasure this morning, this afternoon to introduce the 2022 cohort for the ExoExplorers. This is certainly a fun part of my job, and I look forward to continuing to introduce new cohorts each year at the ExoPAG Meeting, so let's dive in. All right, so for those that aren't already familiar with the program, I thought I'd put together a slight overview. So there are really kind of three main tenets that I think motivated the program, first being visibility. The pandemic has presented many challenges, among them the limited opportunities for early-career scientists to interact and collaborate with, interface with the larger ExoPlanet community, and so our goal with this program was to create an internal and external network for early-career scientists. So within a cohort, but also of course, with the broader community. I think one thing I kind of failed to appreciate even in the second cohort is that obviously this is still an issue and so it's great that this program can help continue to foster that interaction. Our second tenet being inclusion, and so we want to amplify early-career scientists but especially those in underserved and underrepresented communities, and so I wanted to emphasize also that inclusion is now formally one of NASA's core values, and so this is very much, this program is very much in line with that core value. And finally, science. At the end of the day, we really want to amplify the excellent science that is being done by these early-career scientists, and so using the framework of the ExoPlanet Exploration Program Science Gap List to serve as a touchstone for the science talks. Maybe someone in the chat can drop in the Science Gap List for those that are not aware what that is or have not looked at it lately, but this is really just a framework for kind of shaping the science diversity that this cohort would bring. And largely speaking, the program serves the broader exoplanet community with continued enabled support from ExEP and from ExoPAG. Okay, so just again, a brief primer on the kind of overview of the program. The main goal throughout has been to really enable contact between this early-career cohort as we've called them and exoplanet scientists in the broader community. So our core team that organizes this program is comprised of a steering committee and an organizing committee. The steering committee is consisting of current and former members of the ExoPAG Executive Committee that helped shape the selection criteria for the cohort members, evaluate the applications, and ultimately make the recommendations for selection. Additionally, there is the organizing committee which essentially coordinates a lot of the logistics, of which there are many, particularly in a virtual environment. So they both play important roles in the inception of this program. Throughout the inception of the program, we also had careful discussions about recruitment, advertising, and evaluation. We want to make sure that not only that the program itself is striving for those goals that I've described, but also the methodologies that go into that reflect those core tenets. So aiming for broad recruitment and advertisement, so thinking broadly, you know, what are the communities that we're not reaching, how can we reach them better, including applicants not only in peer research, but also in developing technology, and so you'll see that amongst the cohort members. We want to make sure the call for applications itself traces well to the selection criteria rubric, because that leads to equity and equitable evaluation of said candidates. And just as a side note, for those that were not successful in being selected to this particular cohort, we offer a 30-minute debrief to any candidate that would like to get any feedback on their application, and so you know, I think that serves, I think for especially early-career scientists, even senior scientists like myself and others, you know, we don't get a lot of opportunity for a debrief and for direct feedback, so you can imagine that quite a few early-career scientists jumped at the opportunity to really have that conversation and to understand more directly how to improve their application. Okay, so before going into the components, I just wanted to thank the ExoPlanet ExoExplorer Steering Committee and Organizing Committee for their continued support. I think since we last spoke, since I last presented at the June ExoPAG meeting, Knicole Colon has joined us on the steering committee side of things, you know, among her many responsibilities helping launch a space telescope, she found time for this, so I really thank Knicole for her support on this front, and also on the organizing committee side of things, Raissa Estrela has joined our organizing committee, as I said, there's a lot of logistics to get this program off the ground, but I want to thank everybody else on the steering committee and the organizing committee for their help. So briefly-- - This is Jennifer Gregory. - Sure. - [Jennifer] Hey, sorry to interrupt. Just to let you know, it looks okay on my end but you're not in full screen mode. - Oh, sorry, thank you so much. - [Jennifer] Make you aware. - Yes, I appreciate it. - Sure. - While I have the floor, I think I just want to encourage folks to make sure they're muted. I keep hearing clicks and various things, I don't know if it's my end or if it's on the audio side of things, so just a reminder to make sure you're muted if you're not speaking, thank you, and thank you for that Jennifer. Yeah, all right, so diving into the components then of the ExoExplorers Program. So the first part is the speaker series, which most of you may be familiar with and so each of the cohort members delivers a half-hour talk, and so the first talk of the 2022 cohort is Friday, January 21st, so next Friday at 11:00 a.m. Pacific, 2:00 p.m. Eastern, so I'll give more info towards the end of the talk but I just wanted to put that up front. And so that's really the kind of seminal part I would say of the program, and so last year we had quite a few people attending and participating, and that was really great to see. To support these talks, you know, we essentially handle these almost as seminars, and so with that, when one typically visits a university, they often have the opportunity to meet one-on-one with various scientists at that institution and so we're really trying to replicate that, and so when I say one-on-one meetings with prominent scientists of their choosing, each cohort member brings their ideas to who they might like to meet with and learn more about their science, and so we on the organizing and steering committees help facilitate those interactions. There are also ExoGuides that participate in this program, and so these are prominent exoplanet scientists that present talks directly to the cohort in kind of a closed-room forum, but they are later recorded and posted online, but they also participate in informal discussions with the ExoExplorers to discuss any questions they have, any ideas they might like to bring, so I'll detail all of that in the next few slides, but I'll just post here I think maybe Rob or someone had posted on the website that the ExoExplorer and ExoGuide talks will be recorded and posted on our ExoExplorers page. So that's component one. Component two, professional development activities, and so these are activities that are often, are recommended by the cohorts, so you know, whatever they choose, they want to learn more about, and develop their skills, those are workshops that we organize, activities we organize for them, and then finally any forums for building an internal network, so we're really trying to here create an internal and an external network, and so using things like Slack or regular social hours to you know, help get them to know each other and perhaps even collaborate on a scientific and technological standpoint. So before diving into announcing the full cohort, I just wanted to briefly provide an overview of any updates, so this is our second year, I think as Michael mentioned and Gary mentioned, and so we certainly took a step back and said, you know, we wanted to expand the scope a little bit and see what else we could do to challenge ourselves and really open up the opportunities for folks not only in the U.S. but also internationally, and so to that end, we've expanded the program to include international ExoExplorers and ExoGuides. And so as a result, we wanted to you know, maintain with that increased number of applicants potentially, we wanted to expand the cohort commensurately, and so we've expanded the cohort from 10 in our first year to 12 this year. So among the applications, we for the 2020 ExoExplorers, we had 65 total applications, of which 12 are selected. One is formerly international in terms of their institution, but I will say among our ExoExplorers this year, there are quite a few that are inherently international, either are from international countries or have attended international institutions in the past, so I appreciate that there's a lot of international perspective despite the one simply listed here as international. Among the ExoGuides, so this year, we also had an open call for ExoGuide nominations, be it self-nominations or nominations of others, and so we received 10 applications of those, of which four were selected, one of which again was international to reflect the international aspect of the ExoExplorers. On the other end of things, we really looked to the 2021 cohort for any lessons learned, we had a debrief with them at the conclusion of their six-month duration, and so we learned a lot of useful information through that debrief and through these continued interactions, and so one thing we learned is that they really wanted more back and forth engagement with the cohort and the core team and the ExoGuides, so you know, it's not so much that it's kind of a one-way street that we're presenting to them, they want us to hear from them too, which makes sense. You know, they're the next generation of exoplanet scientists and they have the great ideas for ways in which to make our field better, and so-- - [Ilaria] Tiffany, sorry to interrupt, two minutes to go. - Okay, thank you. So we should be learning from them as much as they should be learning from us, and then of course eventually adding an in-person, live component, you know. So far, it obviously can't happen now, but hopefully we'll have it in the future. All right, so let me dive in here, I've talked enough. So here's the 2022 ExoExplorers cohort, there's also a Meet the ExoExplorers webpage where they answered questions on the website so you can learn more about them. Munazza Alam, who's a postdoc at Carnegie EPL; Aida Behmard, who's a graduate student at Caltech; Kiersten Boley, who's a graduate student at OSU; Aarynn Carter, who's a postdoc at UCSC; Quadry Chance, who's a graduate student at University of Florida; Matthew Clement, who's a postdoc at Carnegie EPL; Leonardo dos Santos, who's a postdoc at Space Telescope; Alison Farrish who's a postdoc at Goddard; Briley Lewis, who's a graduate student at UCLA; Romy Rodriguez, who's a graduate student at OSU, Julia Seidel, who's a postdoc at ESO Chile; and Eckhart Spalding, who's a postdoc at Notre Dame. I apologize if I mixed up graduate student or postdoc or anything, I'm just trying to make sure to get through in time, but we're very excited to have this dynamic group of people, really excited to start interacting with them in just a few weeks' time. Also briefly, here are our 2022 ExoGuides. So again, there's a webpage that describes them more fully, they also have a set of Q&A questions that are posted to the website. Jose Caballero, who's at the Spanish Centro de Astrobiologia; Bruce Macintosh, who's at Stanford University; Elisa Quintana, who's at NASA Goddard; and Sarah Rugheimer, who's currently at Oxford University. So again, great group of people, really looking forward to interacting with them as well. Briefly, I know that the question has continued to come up and we're continuing to assess different ways with which to provide metrics for success. So you know, how are we doing, are we really responding to what the cohort members want? So within the cohort, we've sent two anonymous surveys at the beginning of the program and again at the end of the program, so at the beginning of the program we've already sent this anonymous survey that essentially allows for conducting self-assessment. You know, what are the goals of your program, what are you hoping to get out of it, what can we do for you, and so we're currently assessing the responses of that anonymous survey as we speak. And at the end of the program, we'll be sending out a similar survey to you know, ask them did that meet your expectations, is there more we could've done, how can we improve the program? And then within the ExoPlanet community, we can track things like impressions and total engagements and the tweets that we send advertising the ExoExplorer talks, for example, so this is one from last year, and so we'll continue to track those things. We welcome any other metrics in terms of helping to assess the health of this program. And so finally, I just wanted to close with two last things, the ExoExplorers talk schedule thus far, we actually have it set and so our first set of talks, I think I've already mentioned are on January 21st, which is next Friday at 11 a.m. Pacific and 2:00 p.m. Eastern, and so our first two speakers are Munazza Alam and Matt Clement, both from Carnegie EPL, as it happens, but they're talking about very different science. So it should really be interesting for really a lot of exoplanet scientists. So the full abstracts are posted now to the ExoExplorers website, perhaps someone on the OC can drop that link in the chat. And then the other ExoExplorer talk dates have already been scheduled, and so they'll be occurring the third Friday of each month, so you can mark your calendars, again at 11:00 a.m. Pacific, 2:00 p.m. Eastern, and so those are listed here. Those will also be eventually listed on the website as well, so please take a look and make sure to, yeah, make sure to mark your calendars. I also wanted to just mark a save-the-date. So this AAS, the 2021 cohort, last year's cohort had independently organized an AAS Special Session, that was entitled, "The ExoExplorers: "Early-Career Perspectives on the Intersection "of Exoplanet Science and DEI in Astronomy," so a really important topic, but given the cancellation of the AAS this year, they collectively decided to postpone their submission of the session to the winter AAS meeting in 2023, so whenever that date gets marked, please save the date. We'll be soliciting community feedback, perhaps someone on the OC can post that since I know I'm well out of time, and I'll just close with this, you know, a thank you to the ExEP, the ExoPAG, and NASA headquarters for their continued support. Thanks again to the SC and the OC for their hard work, and thanks to all of you for your continued attendance and participation, we're really excited to see where this program goes. Any other questions, here's the mailing email for that and then there's an announcement list that I encourage you all to sign up for. And with that, I'll take any questions if there's time, thanks. - Thank you very much, Tiffany. We have just one minute, I've seen that there is a question on the Q&A tool, but actually is not too much pertinent to your talk so I will leave it there for a moment. Any question to Tiffany on this excellent program? Okay, I don't see a question there, but let me ask you a very quick question. What is the limiting factor in the number of ExoExplorers that you select per year? I've seen that you have already expanded, which is great, but, just to-- - Yeah, no, that's a great question. It's really, it's a couple of things. It's logistics, certainly coordinating a larger cohort will mean larger logistics, more people, but really, it's about I think the amount of engagement that they can get amongst themselves and amongst the broader community, and so you know, a cohort of 20 may not get the same individual engagement within the kind of cohort itself, as you know, say 10 or 12. So 10 seems to be a sweet spot, but we're certainly considering, you know, all aspects, maybe we'll expand, maybe we'll keep it small. But so far, 10 to 12 has kind of seemed like the ideal size for interaction amongst the cohort.