Achievement

With support from NSF IGERT and NASA, a group of NSF IGERT Astrobiology Program Trainees and Associates from Earth and Space Sciences, Oceanography, Microbiology, and Astronomy at the University of Washington organized and hosted the annual Astrobiology Graduate Student Conference on the UW Seattle campus, Summer 2009. The organization involved weekly meetings over the course of six months to plan out logistics as well as the scientific contents and advertisement for the conference. These meetings and the conference itself immensely enhanced interaction between students of different disciplines in the UW AB Program and beyond. Furthermore, it was a great learning experience to all members on the organizing committee and it will help prepare future scientific meetings of larger scale. A particularly noteworthy experience was to be involved in the introduction of Second Life as a virtual online platform with the potential to facilitate international conferences and collaborations.