Abstract
Through the direct financial support of FAPESP, the school was able to gather 10 international and 19 national senior lecturers and 80 fully funded and 20 partially funded participants. Most were graduate students, but a significant parcel was also made up of undergraduates, postdocs, and early career researchers. Twenty-five different nationalities and several scientific areas were present, creating a truly international and interdisciplinary event.
In addition to the lectures, the program included visits to the Brazilian synchrotron laboratory (CNPEM–LNLS) and a field trip to Parque Estadual Turístico do Alto Ribeira, a cave park and natural reserve in the state of São Paulo. With the subtitle “Making Connections,” the main goal of the school is not only to present the state of the art of the many branches of astrobiology but also to foster the interaction of students and researchers of different fields such that they can build bridges between disciplines and begin collaborations.
With this objective, one of the central activities of the school was the Research Focus Group, in which the participants were divided into 13 heterogeneous teams (each composed of different nationalities, scientific backgrounds, and academic levels) and challenged to create, write, and present a scientific proposal in an astrobiology-related subject during the first week of the school. The participants also had the responsibility of choosing the best proposals on the basis of their own presentations. This activity was designed to provide an intense experience of proposal creation, writing, and judging. To be successful, the groups needed to develop (1) good leadership skills and coordination of the individual works, (2) original research ideas, (3) a feasible working plan and budget, and (4) a captivating short presentation that conveyed to the voting audience (their peers) not only the scientific validity of their idea but the economic viability as well. All proposals were required to comprise a scientific plan, a working schedule for the 3-year duration of the project, a realistic budget with possible funding sources, and solid references. Authors of the three winning proposals were offered the opportunity to publish their work in this issue of Astrobiology as education articles (Angerhausen et al., 2013; Barge et al., 2013: Novoselov et al., 2013). As can be seen on the following pages, the articles represent very distinct proposals in astrobiology, from basic science to public outreach.
This experience in science was very successful, as the participants eagerly embraced the idea and worked hard to accomplish their goals. In our final poll on the opinion of the participants of SPASA, 80% considered the amount of time insufficient to develop a good proposal, and 86% were enthusiastic to see their proposals published in Astrobiology. All, in fact, presented high-quality work. The interest of the participants in working with interdisciplinary subjects can be inferred by the fact that 63% of them indicated it was not difficult to work in heterogeneous groups, but there was still a significant parcel that had problems interacting with colleagues of different academic levels and backgrounds—a result that may be due the current academic paradigm.
It is with great pleasure that we, the organizers of SPASA, have found that the ideas raised during the school and presented in the following pages will be used as seeds of real research and outreach projects for the participants. To our knowledge, an itinerant exhibit is already being prepared based on the ideas of the paper of Barge and colleagues, while Angerhausen and his colleagues are developing the ideas of HABEBEE in their postdoctorate and graduate research projects. A few posters on these works have already been presented at AbSciCon 2012 and the IAU General Assembly 2012.