The Institute of Space Sciences will start the new year ahead with a strategy retreat in Santa Maria de Montserrat Abbey from January 24th to 26th. This will be the first retreat to be held after the pandemic!

The centre celebrated its first strategy retreat in 2017 aiming at create an interactive, pleasurable atmosphere for team building, to help the whole institute get aligned, look into the future and take a big picture view. In 2018, the strategy retreat took place outside the institute for the first time, in Montserrat Abbey. In 2019, there was another retreat held at ICE-CSIC building, at the UAB campus.

This year the institute is thrilled to go on its fourth strategy retreat, which had to be postponed due to Covid-19 pandemic.

During the first day, the executive team will comment on the general status of the institute, to be followed by a talk on the past, present and future of the Advanced Engineering Unit. The heads of the Department of Astrophysics and Planetary Sciences and the Department of Cosmology and Fundamental Physics will give a status update too.

After that, in the afternoon, ICE-CSIC researchers will talk about current space missions like ARIEL, PLATO, EUCLID and ARRAKIHS, and Engineers from the AEU will speak about measurements of environmental parameters and technology transfer opportunities.

To top it all off, we’ll host the ‘Best paper awards’, a program that intends to award a prized for the best paper by a student and the best paper by a fellow in recognition of a work that is likely to make an impact in the field or brings new perspectives into it. The award will be partial or full support for attendance to a conference during the next year and/or invitation back to ICE-CSIC.

During the second day, there will be a number of talks by PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, as well as three parallel sessions. On the third and final day, there will be conferences by PhD and postdoc researchers, as well as talks by senior researchers and engineers. We’ll conclude with a discussion on the technological roadmap of the Advanced Engineering Unit (AEU) and some concluding remarks.

Stay tuned to our social media to know everything about it!