[AAA] Fwd: Welcome from the new IAU officers message

[Beatriz Garcia]

Estimados colegas,
Tengo el gusto de compartir este menSaje de las nuevas autoridades de la
IAU.

Saludos cordiales
Beatriz

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Ewine van Dishoeck, IAU President <no-reply en iau.org>
Date: mar., 23 de oct. de 2018 1:07 p. m.
Subject: Welcome from the new IAU officers message
To: <beatriz.garcia en iteda.cnea.gov.ar>


Dear all,

The four IAU Officers
<https://www.iau.org/public/images/detail/KH9A8904-180831-CC/> appointed
for the next triennium, Ewine F. van Dishoeck (President), Maria Teresa
V.T. Lago (General Secretary), Debra M. Elmegreen (President-elect) and Ian
Robson (Assistant General Secretary), gave their incoming addresses at the
XXX General Assembly held in August 2018 in Vienna. For those of you not
present, we are attaching our speeches and links below. All of us are
honored to serve the IAU and its mission: to help promote and safeguard
astronomy in all its aspects through global cooperation.

We look forward to take the IAU into its second century with you!

Ewine van Dishoeck
IAU President
------------------------------
<https://www.iau.org/public/images/detail/KH9A8904-180831-CC/>
*This picture taken during the IAU General Assembly 2018 in Vienna
(Austria) features the IAU Officers. From left to right: Prof. Ian Robson,
Assistant General Secretary; Prof. Teresa Lago, General Secretary; Prof.
Ewine van Dishoeck, President and Prof. Debra Elmegreen, President Elect.
Credit: IAU/M. Zamani*
------------------------------
Speech from the incoming IAU President
<http://astronomy2018.cosmoquest.org/newspaper/welcome_address_from_incoming_president_ewine_van_dishoeck/>
Ewine F. van Dishoeck

Dear colleagues and friends,

It has been two months since I had the honor to address you as the new
President of the IAU in Vienna. Since not all of you could attend the
General Assembly, I would like to share my thoughts with you also through
this route. I attended my first IAU General Assembly in 1979 in Montreal
with my husband Tim de Zeeuw, at the invitation of the then President,
Adriaan Blaauw. I was still a MSc student in theoretical chemistry, but it
was a fantastic experience to be there, seeing and talking to all these
famous astronomers like Chandrasekhar! I could never have dreamed that I
would be standing in front of you 40 years later.

The IAU organization depends on astronomers dedicating their ‘free’ time to
make the IAU work, and over the last three years we have been fortunate to
have a highly experienced group at the helm: Silvia Torres-Peimbert as
president and Piero Benvenuti working night and day as the general
secretary, supported in the Paris Office by Rosaria d’Antonio and Madeleine
Smith-Spanier. Assistant general secretary Teresa Lago had an increasing
load with the OAD and OAO Offices, and the Vice Presidents and Division
Presidents have been active as well. Also, the very capable support by the
IAU press officer Lars Lindberg Christensen and the ESO team on website and
databases is essential for IAU communications. Many thanks to all of you;
the biggest applause should undoubtedly go to Piero. I look forward to
working closely with the new Officers --Teresa, Debra Elmegreen and Ian
Robson --, and the new Executive Committee and Division Presidents, to
hopefully make the running equally smooth. With three, and soon four, IAU
Offices, this is no small enterprise compared with a decade ago. In the
newly approved Strategic Plan 2020-2030 we quote the Indian philosopher
Rabindranath Tagore: ‘You can’t cross the sea by simply standing and
staring at the water’. We need the help and support of many of you to make
our dreams into reality.

So, what are you going to do as President, I got asked a lot in the
corridors in Vienna? When I became President-elect three years ago I had a
number of goals. The first of them was to promote the presence of young
scientists in the Union, and I was pleased that the other Officers had
exactly the same priority. So now we have the Junior Member category. The
challenge will be for the Junior Member WG to develop activities worldwide
that benefit their development and to learn best practices from each other.
Junior members will also have a role in promoting astronomy worldwide, and
I look forward to working with them. A second goal was to provide a more
comprehensive overview of the IAU as a whole: where do all our activities,
many of them new, fit in the bigger picture? What are we missing and where
are overlaps? What are the mandates of the various Offices? This has
resulted in the writing of the Strategic Plan 2020-2030 together with
Debra, so it will be our joint responsibility that the list of actions in
that plan are implemented. As an example, further promoting Women in
Astronomy across the globe, and more generally enhancing Diversity and
Inclusion in the IAU, is high on that list. IAU Symposium 358 in Japan on
Astronomy for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in November 2019 will be an
important step in charting a roadmap to actions.

Celebrating the IAU 100 years will keep us very busy in 2019, but it is
also a fabulous opportunity to give many of our Strategic Plan goals a
boost and show to our fellow scientists, policy makers, teachers, educators
and general public what a century of astronomy has brought to society.
Please take a moment to look at our IAU100 website, www.iau-100.org, for
activities in your area and visit the Above and Beyond IAU100 exhibition if
it is in your neighborhood. Fundraising for IAU100 and IAU activities will
be part of this; the IAU now welcomes donations from its members through
www.iau.org/donate. Online donation options will be setup soon. For any
enquiries, please contact the IAU Secretariat <+dantonio en iap.fr>.

Another area that I feel strongly about is the Global Coordination of Large
Facilities, a working group that has been elevated to report directly to
the Executive Committee. Astronomy is an observationally driven field, so
progress requires increasingly larger telescopes and instrumentation that
can see sharper, deeper and more sensitive than previous facilities. We
have been fortunate to have an armada of new telescopes and satellites
across the electromagnetic spectrum over the past decades, with
multi-messenger facilities ramping up. But this steady stream of new
facilities cannot be taken for granted. We are already seeing that some of
our dreams, like the 20-40m class telescopes on the ground, are taking
longer to come to fruition. Large scientific infrastructures are no longer
the domain of just astronomers and physicists: other areas, from
atmospheric science, geochemistry, and life sciences to the humanities and
social sciences, require increasingly large facilities as well to advance
their field (often in the form of large databases). They now also have the
ears and eyes of the funding agencies and politicians. Global collaboration
or coordination in astronomy is therefore increasingly important as the
costs and preparation to build, and especially operate, our forefront
facilities and missions escalate. The IAU provides a neutral forum to bring
various parties together and foster collaboration at an early stage. With
support of the Kavli foundation we will be stepping up our working group
activities.

This brings me to the final aspect that I would like to bring to your
attention: multidisciplinary science. The ‘wheel’ that was on the cover of
the 2010-2020 Strategic Plan, and that is also included in the 2020-2030
plan, illustrates in a powerful way how astronomy links with other fields,
ranging from technology and large data to other sciences, education and
culture. Without often realizing it, astronomy is very dependent on
developments in these fields. Without fundamental physics and material
sciences we would not have the progress in detectors, telescope and
instrument components. A program like CLOUDY, used by hundreds of
astronomers, required a century of work by thousands of atomic and
molecular physicists to compute and measure all the basic data. Science is
becoming more inter- or multi-disciplinary, and new funding may be shifting
in that direction. Astronomers need to be prepared for this shift, and this
means fostering and enhancing collaborations and making scientists from
other fields feel welcome in our midst. I would therefore like to encourage
more interdisciplinary IAU Symposia in the coming years, on average at
least one per year. We have seen an excellent example in Vienna with the
IAUS 345 Origins symposium, with speakers from geochemistry, atmospheric
science and biology. The 2016 IAUS 338 on Gravitational Waves was another
example together with physics, and in 2019 there will be IAUS 350 on
Laboratory Astrophysics. Perhaps a next one could be on big data together
with informatics.

Finally, I would like to end with some wise words from the past. Antoine de
Saint Exupéry wrote: ‘If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to
collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to
long for the endless immensity of the sea’. Taking the freedom to modify
this quote to apply to the IAU, it becomes: ‘If you want to do astronomy,
don't drum up people to collect components and don't assign them tasks and
work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity and beauty of
the Universe’. Ultimately it is this inspiration, this quest to determine
our place in the Universe, what it is all about and that drives us all:
scientists, engineers and technicians alike. I look forward to take the IAU
into its second century with you in the coming years.
------------------------------
Incoming General Secretary Teresa Lago On the Next Triennium
<http://astronomy2018.cosmoquest.org/newspaper/incoming-general-secretary-teresa-lago-on-the-next-triennium/>

I feel privileged to become the new IAU General Secretary — this is an
especially exciting time to be more closely involved in the IAU. During my
three years as Assistant General Secretary, I witnessed that the
organisation is going through a particularly healthy period, with
record-breaking submissions for IAU meetings:

   - 33 proposals for IAU Symposia for 2017, although only nine could be
   supported; 69 proposals for Symposia and Focus Meetings for 2018, of which
   we could only select seven Symposia and 15 Focus Meeting for the GA
   programme, plus a further three Symposia to be held at other times in the
   year.
   - 30 proposals for IAU Symposia for 2019, from which nine have been
   selected.

This sentiment was further strengthened by the competition to organise the
2024 General Assembly: the IAU received seven letters of intent. Once
again, this is a record, which led to the need to adopt a two-step
selection process to allow for proper discussion and evaluation of the
proposals.

These large numbers of proposals reflects the relevance of the IAU to its
member countries.

There is yet another reason for my enthusiasm. The IAU Strategic Plan
2020-2030 is the first time that the IAU has clearly defined its mission:
to promote and safeguard astronomy in all its aspects through international
cooperation. And it goes further, giving a comprehensive overview of the
organisation’s general activities, how they fit together and how they
complement each other.

The goals proposed for the next decade in the Strategic Plan are:

   - The IAU leads the worldwide coordination of astronomy and the
   fostering of communication and dissemination of astronomical knowledge
   among professional astronomers.
   - The IAU promotes the inclusive advancement of the field of astronomy
   in every country.
   - The IAU promotes the use of astronomy as a tool for development in
   every country.
   - The IAU engages the public in astronomy through access to astronomical
   information and communication of the science of astronomy.
   - The IAU stimulates the use of astronomy for teaching and education at
   school level.

This sets out my mandate as General Secretary of the IAU. However, this is
a shared mission, involving each and every one of our members. I will do my
best, but I count on your initiative, your passion and your commitment to
astronomy!

The IAU as a solid organisation that encompasses not only all of its
scientific structures — Divisions, Commissions and Working Groups — but
also consolidates on its pillars, the four offices dedicated to the pursuit
of education through astronomy, the training of future astronomers,
astronomy for development and the communication of astronomy to the public.

Three of these offices have been established through bilateral agreements
and are already in operation. To install the fourth office — Astronomy for
Education — an international call will soon be launched to identify the IAU
partners in this new endeavour. The goal is that by the middle of the
triennium, the four offices will be fully operational, involved in
collaboration with each other and sharing a similar standing within the
organisation.

Next year marks the 100th anniversary of the IAU. As the organisation grows
older, pursuing its long-term traditions, it also grows in size, with new
members entering the organisation and rejuvenating it with new ideas and
bold proposals.

I have learned from experience that dreams can come true through
determination, creativity, and — above all — networking! Together, we will
advance and excel, bounded by clear principles: transparency, inclusiveness
and creativity.
------------------------------
Greetings From Incoming President-Elect Debra Elmegreen
<http://astronomy2018.cosmoquest.org/newspaper/greetings-from-incoming-president-elect-debra-elmegreen/>

The scientific highlights and historical reflections presented over the
last two weeks in Vienna at the XXXth General Assembly have underscored how
far astronomy has come and how much the IAU has evolved in the last
century. We’re now as far beyond the first moon landing (almost 50 years)
as the formation of the IAU was ahead of it. The astronomical and
technological advances in the interim have taken us from a time of lone
observers on mountaintops to an era of enormous international teams, big
telescopes on the ground and in space, massive datasets, and
multi-messenger astronomy, as beautifully illustrated in the IAU’s 100-year
exhibition “Above and Beyond.”

Astronomy is truly a global endeavor, and the IAU, as the worldwide
organisation of professional astronomers, is uniquely positioned to help
foster broad scientific exchanges. We are active on many fronts to help
advance astronomy internationally, such as the executive-level working
group on global coordination of ground and space-based astrophysics and
heliophysics. Beyond its initial focus of bringing astronomers together
through General Assemblies, symposia, and workshops, the IAU has expanded
in just the last decade to include offices whose primary responsibilities
are to train our next generation of astronomers, to use astronomy and its
technologies as tools for development, and to communicate astronomy to the
public.

With the new Strategic Plan for 2020-2030, we look forward to initiating an
office of astronomy for education, which will be engaged in helping primary
and secondary school teachers incorporate astronomy in the classroom
through training, development of syllabi and standards, and access to
materials and activities. Because it generates broad excitement, astronomy
is the natural gateway to a lifelong interest in science. The new junior
member category, as well as increased efforts for gender equity in
astronomy and other inclusion initiatives, should continue to make the IAU
a more welcoming and diverse body, which ultimately benefits all of
astronomy.

As incoming president-elect, I look forward to learning from our
outstanding outgoing president Silvia Torres-Peimbert and incoming
president Ewine van Dishoeck, and continuing to serve with our Executive
Committee and Division Presidents. I hope to build on our mission of
“promoting and safeguarding astronomy through all its aspects (including
research, communication, education, and development) through international
cooperation” and to help make the IAU the global go-to organization for
astronomy. I am counting on our membership to work with us to achieve our
new Strategic Plan goals, and I welcome suggestions. Together we can usher
in a second amazing hundred years.
------------------------------
A message from General Secretary Ian Robson
<http://astronomy2018.cosmoquest.org/newspaper/greetings-from-future-general-secretary-ian-robson/>

Not being an IAU apparatchik, I was extremely surprised, but hugely
honoured, to be invited to become a future General Secretary. My
involvement with the IAU began with heading up a new Working Group on
communicating astronomy with the public. This became Commission 55
(Communicating Astronomy with the Public – CAP) at the Prague 26th GA in
2006 and I was appointed as the first President. Indeed, it is in outreach
that my IAU interest has been focused, organising the first three CAP
conferences, which I found to be hugely stimulating. I was the UK SPOC
(Single Point Of Contact) and a member of the IYA2009 International
Organising Committee, which on reflection took a huge amount of effort but
was tremendously rewarding. I also served for three years as Chair of Task
Force 3 (Public) and member of the EC for the OAD.

The invitation to serve made me think of the purpose of the IAU and what it
actually achieves. I confess that I had not been a dedicated attendee of
General Assembly’s but it was in Prague where I thought the fundamental
role of the IAU was most clearly demonstrated, and of course I’m referring
to the status of Pluto. Being an extragalactic astronomer I was about as
far removed from the Solar System as possible, but nevertheless I had my
views and it was an educational experience to witness the debate swing to
and fro with committed and honourable participants on both sides. For those
of us involved in outreach it was obvious that any decision to downgrade
Pluto would be a huge event and most probably controversial with the
general public. This moment served to thrust professional astronomy into
the mainstream news, and provide a platform for IYA2009, which I felt to be
an enormous success.

So, what for the future? I see my role in the next three years learning how
the organisation actually works, through the Working Groups, Commissions
and Divisions to the work of the EC. I will be supporting Ewine, Teresa and
Debra in their roles and in the new Strategic Plan. This excellent document
clearly sets out the future, but of course the next step is looking at
implementation / delivery / action plans to see the goals rolled out
throughout the IAU. I am particularly keen to ensure that with the precious
resource of many volunteer staff, the offices of the OAD, OAO and the
proposed OAE work together in an efficient and effective manner.

Finally, it has been illuminating to note that of the many people who have
spoken to me about my new role, about half have congratulated and half
commiserated. The slightly worrying aspect is that those mostly ‘in the
know’ are in the latter category. I see a truly interesting challenge ahead!
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