Greetings,
The Research Corporation For Science Advancement is launching three Scialog (science dialog) conference series for early career faculty in 2024 around the themes of Automating Chemical Laboratories; Early Science with the LSST; and Sustainable Metals, Minerals, and Materials. This is not a funding opportunity, but participants have the opportunity to be part of team proposals at each meeting with the potential to receive $50,000 per fellow on each funded team. Additional information can be found below:
Research Corporation For Science Advancement Scialog Conference Series
Eligibility: Early Career faculty, with "early career" defined as any time from just accepting an institution’s faculty offer as an assistant professor through one or two years post-promotion to associate professor (i.e., typically within eight years of their first independent appointment).
Created in 2010 by RCSA, the Scialog format supports research by stimulating intensive interdisciplinary conversation and community building around a scientific theme of global importance. Scialog supports research, intensive dialog, and community building to address scientific challenges of global significance. Within each multi-year initiative, Scialog Fellows collaborate on untested ideas and communicate their progress in annual closed conferences. Teams of two to three Fellows who have not previously collaborated compete for seed funding for high-risk, high-reward projects based on the ideas they develop at the conference.
Scialog aims to:
- support early career faculty to expand research in a focused area of high scientific importance;
- encourage scientists to form multidisciplinary teams to tackle these critical challenges, and;
- help transition awardees to obtain further funding for their innovative ideas.
New Scialog Conference Series:
Automating Chemical Laboratories: This Scialog will bring together about 50 early career scientists from distinct fields including all areas of synthetic chemistry (organic, inorganic, materials, and biological), integrated and automated instrument development, engineering, materials science, computer and data science, and AI computer research. The goal is to create a dynamic, interdisciplinary community that will accelerate progress in the chemical sciences and laboratory automation through collaborative projects marrying advances in automation and AI to key questions in fundamental research. The first meeting in this series will be April 11-14, 2024 in Tucson, AZ.
Early Science with the LSST: Scientists have been preparing for more than a decade to analyze data from the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which is expected to be carried out by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory starting in late 2024. This Scialog will facilitate connections between approximately 50 early career observational astronomers, cosmologists, theoretical physicists and astrophysicists, computational modelers, data scientists, and software engineers, with the goal of catalyzing collaborative projects that will advance the early science needed to make the most of a dataset enabled by one of the most powerful observational machines ever built. The first meeting in this series will be November 14-17, 2024 in Tucson, AZ.
Sustainable Metals, Minerals, and Materials: This Scialog series will facilitate connections between approximately 50 early career chemists, materials scientists, geologists, ecologists, engineers, and energy system modelers, with the goal of catalyzing collaborative, cross-disciplinary projects to investigate how to design, manufacture, and recycle substances so that their use and production at scale is more compatible with ethical stewardship of our environment and decarbonizing the energy system. The first meeting in this series will be Sept. 4-7, 2024 in Tucson, AZ.
Interested parties must be nominated for consideration to participate. There is no limit to the number of nominations from an institution and self-nominations are accepted. To nominate yourself, use the
Scialog Fellow Nomination Form. To nominate another early career scientist, contact the program director or ask your colleague to self-nominate using the Nomination Form.
In addition to the new series, two other Scialogs will continue this fall. The Fellows and facilitators for these meetings have already been identified but you may still nominate faculty for these conferences in case there are any openings. These Scialogs are:
Faculty who have received funding from sponsors following participation in Scialog conferences include Brian Liau (CCB, 2019), Maxim Prigozhin (MCB, 2019), and Daniel Needleman (MCB, 2016).
Questions from FAS or SEAS faculty about this opportunity may be directed to research_development@fas.harvard.edu.