European Astronomical Society
e-Newsletter  7
October 2018

Isabelle Vauglin is the chair of the EWASS hosting committee that is responsible for the local organisation of the EWASS meeting at the Manufacture des Tabacs in Lyon, from 24 to 28 June, 2019. The site, nicely located in the student area of Universite Lyon 3, has a maximum capacity of about 1200 participants.

In 2019 we want to make a switch to electronic posters. We have experimented with this way of presenting scientific work at EWASS 2018 in Liverpool, and we want to further explore the possibilities of electronic posters in Lyon. One can download the poster on smartphone, tablet or laptop, or project the poster on a large screen in a dedicated room. A practical motivation is that the display of paper posters requires a lot of space. The concept of electronic posters has been a great success, for example, at medical conferences.

The departing members of the Council were thanked and the newly elected ones were welcomed by the EAS Secretary. The EAS Executive Secretary subsequently presented the imminent elections for the Treasurer and President positions. A Nomination Committee has been set up and more details of this will be circulated soon. The General Assembly concluded with a report on EAS prizes and the forthcoming EWASS 2019 meeting in Lyon.

Unfortunately, the required quorum for a valid General Assembly was not met. The Council has decided to undertake an email ballot instead of either calling for an extraordinary EAS General Assembly or waiting until the June 2019 EWASS in Lyon. The only items for which approval by EAS members is required are the minutes from the 25th GA in Prague in 2017, and the EAS accounts for 2017. The invitation to participate in this ballot was sent to all EAS members on 16 October 2018, with a deadline of 18 December 2018. All EAS members are kindly requested to participate in this ballot as soon as possible.

As explained in the previous issue of the e-Newsletter, the Affiliated Societies will collect information on proposed EAS members and pass that on to the EAS office. By now, some Societies have finished this task and most Societies are well underway, and we indeed foresee the significant increase in the EAS membership which was one of the drivers of this proposal.

Most EAS members will already have been contacted by their National Society, but where this has not yet happened you may wish to contact your Society to find out how their activities in this regard are progressing. The list of all EAS Affiliated Societies can be found here.

Current EAS members who cannot or do not wish to join this new membership scheme through their National Society still can stay as EAS members in 2019; however, a uniform 40€ membership fee will apply, independent of country or status (Junior/Senior/Ordinary). Note that EAS Life members will be contacted soon.

Sara Lucatello works at the INAF Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova. She obtained her undergraduate degree and PhD from University of Padova, Italy. After postdoctoral work at University of Texas Austin, she was INAF fellow in Padova and later Excellence Cluster Universe fellow in Munich. She joined the faculty at INAF Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova in 2006. She served as a member of the science teams in the SDSS surveys SEGUE-2 and APOGEE and is currently a member of the Galactic Archeology steering committee of European survey WEAVE, where she also coordinates the calibration teams. She has served as a member and co-chair of the organs for diversity and equal opportunities in the SDSS collaboration. Her scientific interests focus on spectroscopic studies of stellar populations, the formation and chemo-dynamical evolution of the Milky Way and its subcomponents, large Galactic stellar surveys and Big Data in Astronomy. She is currently one of the two EAS Vice-Presidents, and is responsible for social media presence, ethics, and the recruitment of organisational members.

Andreas Burkert holds the chair for computational astrophysics at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München since 2003. He got his doctoral degree from the University of Munich and then went on a Feodor Lynen Fellowship to the University of Illinois, Urbana and to the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1991 he joined the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics in Garching as a staff member and in 1995 accepted an offer from the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg to build a new theory group. In 1995 he also received the Habilitation. In EAS Council, he is responsible for the European Regional Office of Astronomy for Development, overseeing issues on education.

Nick Kylafis was a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech and at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He was an Assistant Professor at Columbia University before accepting an Assistant Professor position at the University of Crete in 1985. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1989 and Professor in 1997. He served as Chairman of the Department of Physics from 1999 to 2003, as well as Dean of the School of Sciences from 2008 to 2013. During the period 2012-2016 he was a member of the Council of the University of Crete. He retired and was elected Emeritus Professor in 2016. As EAS Councillor, his responsibilities include the Membership Committee and he acts as the liaison between EAS Council and the Affiliated Societies.

In 2007, the EAS has created the Tycho Brahe Prize; from 2019 onwards, a silver medal and a certificate will be awarded. The award ceremony will take place during the EWASS 2019 meeting in Lyon. The winner of the medal is invited to present a talk at one of the plenary sessions.

Short biographies of previous years' awardees and full details regarding the Tycho Brahe Medal are to be found on the EAS website. There are no restrictions to the nationality of the candidates nor to the country of origin or residence. Nominations are only accepted through a web form accessible for EAS members. The deadline for nominations is Wednesday, 31 October 2018.