#AGU20 Fall Meeting Sessions Due 23 April

By: Guy Brasseur, Fall Meeting Program Committee Chair; Sabine Stanley, Meetings Committee Chair; and Lauren Parr, Vice President, Meetings

We need your help for more session proposals!

While we’re pleased that the submissions so far seem to be outstanding, we still need your ideas for new subjects and ways to share your research with our Earth and space science community at AGU Fall Meeting 2020, 7-11 December in San Francisco, CA.

No matter if it’s in-person, 100% virtual or a mix of the two, we are confident that #AGU20 will shape the conversation of science now and in the future once you submit your town hall, session and workshop proposals.

The AGU Fall Meeting Program Committee will let you know by the second week of June if your proposal was accepted.

In the meantime, we also want to ask you to focus on diversifying your conveners and presenters.

When we think about diversity, it’s everything from race, geographic region, ethnicity and gender, but also opinion, age and science. As you know, AGU has made diversity and inclusion a foundational element to everything we do. In fact, our Ethics, Diversity and Inclusion team released a “Best Practices for Inclusive Remote Meetings” brochure [PDF] that provides simple, but instrumental tips to make sure your remote meetings encourage new voices and opinions.

We strongly believe Fall Meeting is another opportunity for AGU to show our leadership in creating and fostering a diverse and open community. This includes:

• Requiring all board and council members to participate in diversity and inclusion training as a part of their leadership orientation session.
• Providing student travel grants for students from around the world to attend Fall Meeting.
• Offering sessions and events that provide actionable steps to improve diversity and inclusion engagement.
• Creating skill building, funding opportunities and career advancement workshops for student and early career scientists.

But every single one of you have an important role in improving diversity and inclusion in the Earth and space science community. If your session is approved, please be proactive and invite a variety of individuals representing different geographical and disciplinary perspectives, and make sure that your session is built around good ethnic, racial and gender balances. Make sure that you involve colleagues in different career stages who work in different organizations and live in different locations around the world.

The Earth and space science community also needs to foster the next generation of experts and leaders. These are the individuals who will take what we have built and move it forward further to make it even better. It is important that we attract, in particular, students and early career scientists to our discussions.

Just like previous generations did – or we wish they would have done – for us, we can help ease the minds of these new scientists and researchers. We can provide recommendations of what worked (or didn’t work) for us in different stages of our own career, like the College of Fellows is offering for student and early careers as they navigate COVID-19.

We look forward to seeing you at #AGU20!