Boss, A

Cosmovici, C

Ehrenfreund, P

Irvine, W

Kwok, S

Levasseur-Regourd, AC

Morrison, D

Udry, S

Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union

HKU Scholars Hub

Title Commission 51: BioastronomyAuthor(s) Irvine, W; Ehrenfreund, P; Boss, A; Cosmovici, C; Kwok, S;Levasseur-Regourd, AC; Morrison, D; Udry, SCitation International Astronomical Union Proceedings, v. 6,Transactions T27B, p. 180-181Issued Date 2010URL http://hdl.handle.net/10722/128485Rights International Astronomical Union Proceedings. Copyright ©Cambridge University Press.Transactions IAU, Volume XXVIIBProc. XXVII IAU General Assembly, August 2009Ian F. Corbett, ed.c© International Astronomical Union 2010doi:10.1017/S1743921310004989COMMISSION 51 BIOASTRONOMYBIOASTRONOMYPRESIDENT William IrvineVICE PRESIDENT Pascale EhrenfreundPAST PRESIDENT Alan BossORGANIZING COMMITTEE Cristiano CosmoviciSun KwokAnny-Chantal Levasseur-RegourdDavid MorrisonStephane UdryPROCEEDINGS BUSINESS SESSION, 12 August 20091. IntroductionCommission 51 met on August 12, 2009. Outgoing President Alan Boss chaired themeeting, and there were several dozen members present, including incoming PresidentWilliam Irvine, incoming Vice President Pascale Ehrenfreund, and outgoing Past Presi-dent Karen Meech. Commission 51 (C51) was re-authorized for a term of six more yearsat the 2006 Prague General Assembly of the IAU, and hence comes up for renewal at the2012 IAU General Assembly in Beijing, China.2. Organizing CommitteeThe 2006-2009 C51 Organizing Committee (OC) had eight members, ﬁve from theUSA, and three from Europe. Given that IAU rules state that the OC should not havemore than eight members, we needed to allow several current members of the OC torotate oﬀ in order to improve the geographical balance. Past President Karen Meech andOC member David Latham agreed to do so, allowing us to add two new OC members, SunKwok of Hong Kong and Anny-Chantal Levasseur-Regourd of France. Clearly C51 shouldalso attempt to add OC members from other regions that are not currently represented onthe OC, such as from Africa and South America, in time for the 2012 General Assembly.3. Bioastronomy MeetingsThe primary activity of C51 since its inception has been the approximately triennialmeetings on bioastronomy which it holds. Past President Karen Meech presented a sum-mary of the most recent bioastronomy meeting, held in San Juan, Puerto Rico on 16-20July, 2007. The meeting was a complete success, with about 250 bioastronomers in at-tendance. A ﬁeld trip was held to visit the Arecibo Observatory and the Camuy Caves.At the San Juan meeting, plans were made to hold a joint meeting with the InternationalSociety for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL), which also holds triennial meetingson similar topics. It has been recognized for some time that in order to avoid conﬂictsbetween these two meetings, it would be desirable to try to hold joint meetings, for the180BIOASTRONOMY 181ultimate beneﬁt of both groups. This plan was put into action at the ISSOL meeting heldin Florence, Italy in August, 2008, where the C51 OC met with ISSOL President JanetSiefert and her OC and jointly approved plans to hold the ﬁrst combined meeting inMontpellier, France, on 3-8 July 2011. As incoming Vice President, Pascale Ehrenfreundagreed to co-chair the Scientiﬁc Organizing Committee for the 2011 meeting, represent-ing C51, working with Muriel Gargaud and Robert Pascal of ISSOL and their colleaguesfrom Montpellier on the Local Organizing Committee. Pascale Ehrenfreund presented asummary of the plans for the 2011 meeting at the Rio de Janeiro C51 business meeting,and it was clear that the plans for the joint meeting are moving along well and we canexpect that the meeting will be a resounding success.4. Symposium and Special Session SponsorshipC51 has been asked to support various proposals to hold IAU Special Sessions andSymposia, either at the 2009 IAU GA, or on their own. Several of these proposals werejudged to be appropriate for C51 support and were successful, such as the Special Ses-sion on ”Planetary Systems as Potential Sites for Life” at the Rio de Janeiro GeneralAssembly.5. New MembersThe following requests for membership in C51 were approved at the meeting:DESPOIS, Didier (France) GARGAUD, Muriel (France)HAGHIGHIPOUR Nader (United States) KUAN Yi-Jehng (Taiwan)KWOK Sun (Hong Kong) LAMONTAGNE Robert (Canada)LAZIO Joseph (United States) MELOTT Adrian (United States)OHISHI Masatoshi (Japan) VON HIPPEL Ted (United States)The following requests for consultant status were also approved:BRUCATO John R (Italy) DENNING Kathryn (Canada)LAREO Leonardo (Columbia) MACCONE Claudio (Italy)Consultants are bioastronomers who are not members of the IAU and so are not eligiblefor membership. Consultants are no longer recognized by the IAU, but C51 continuesto recognize their interests in the ﬁeld of bioastronomy and keeps them aware of C51activities by virtue of their place on the e-mail distribution list.C51 continues to seek astronomers who wish to be recognized as members. We encourageinterested IAU members to ask to join C51, which can be accomplished simply by sendingan e-mail to the incoming C51 President, William Irvine (irvine@fcrao1.astro.umass.edu).6. Closing remarksWe expect that the experiment of holding Bioastronomy meetings in concert with ourcolleagues in ISSOL will be a success, and we hope that all C51 members will be ableto participate in the Montpellier, France joint meeting. Bioastronomy is a relatively newﬁeld that continues to grow and expand, as we make continue to make progress towardunderstanding the prevalence of life in the universe, how it originates, and how it evolves.Alan P. BossPresident of the Commission

Commission 51: Bioastronomy

http://hub.hku.hk/bitstream/10722/128485/1/Content.pdf

Commission 51: Bioastronomy

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

HKU Scholars Hub