Leicester Researchers and the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC)

Planetary Scientists from the University of Leicester have played a leading role in the first Virtual Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC).

The EPSC conference is the annual gathering of the Europlanet Society, which was scheduled to happen in Grenada this September.  A year on from a fabulous conference in Geneva, the planetary community is now spread around the world, watching from home offices and COVID-safe workplaces.  The EPSC organisers, including Leicester’s Dr. Leigh Fletcher on the Virtual Organising Committee, delivered a conference that made the most of the virtual environment we find ourselves in, being cautious not to overwhelm people with Zoom, whilst hoping to showcase the incredible diversity of European Planetary Science.

There are many ways that you can do a live meeting, so the EPSC organisers researched some of the “best-practice” techniques for how others had approached virtual conferencing.  They didn’t want to translate the normal EPSC directly into a virtual meeting, with very long days and lots of parallel sessions.  In particular, they were keen to build on the “nearly-carbon-neutral” conference scheme that had been developed as a means of mitigating the climate crisis.  Following this, EPSC2020 was spread over multiple weeks (September 21st-October 9th), with orals and posters replaced by videos and short slideshows that are all pre-recorded so that the audience could digest them at their own leisure, irrespective of time zones.  There were over a thousand abstracts submitted, more than 2/3rds of which were videos. 

The contributed videos and posters were combined with a programme of live sessions:  a live briefing and interviews with key members of the European community in the morning, with keynote lectures and short courses in the afternoon.  These were mixed with 20-minute long session showcases, where the conveners gave a short summary of the asynchronous sessions.  These are kept to short blocks, one in the European morning (benefiting our colleagues in Asia), and one in the European afternoon (benefitting our colleagues in the US).  All were recorded, so that people could catch up in their own time.

One example of a session showcase, highlighting the Ice Giant research of Naomi Rowe-Gurney, Emma Thomas, and Mike Roman in Leicester’s Planetary Group, can be found below, hosted by Leigh Fletcher. Presentations from each of these Leicester researchers, along with Arrate Antunaño, Henrik Melin, James Blake, Beatriz Sanchez-Cano, Oliver King, Gabby Provan, Graham Hall and others can be found on Vimeo.