From the Desk of the ISSI Executive Director

Dear Colleagues,

with 2023 winding down, it is time to reflect on the accomplishments and challenges of this year.

We are saddened to watch a world that is now riddled with conflicts.At ISSI, we take solace in the realization that science remains the great unifier, the common language that you all speak, when you visit our institution. Science does not know national barriers or frontiers, because all scientists share the same desire to pursue knowledge, to understand the Universe, whether it is by studying our beautiful planet, or the mysteries of our Sun, or observing the furthest galaxies.

ISSI’s mission is stronger than ever, and we are eager to continue playing our small role in making this world a better and more peaceful place. The number of scientists we welcomed at ISSI this year has exceeded pre-pandemic levels, and the request to visit is growing. There is a sense of joy in gathering in a neutral and welcoming environment just to focus on compelling scientific questions, unincumbered by daily duties, in beautiful Bern. We hear this from our visitors all the time, how much they enjoy spending time at ISSI, discussing and debating, moving science forward. After less than one year in this job as Executive Director, I still marvel at the feeling of fulfillment that comes from hearing the happy chatter in the hallways, from seeing the smiles of diverse groups of people working together, with intent.

As we look at the future, I am delighted to share some news that I believe will help us serving you, our community, even better. First, we have acquired a small amount of additional space on the fourth floor that will allow for an expanded office and conference footprint. There will be more space for informal discussions and gatherings. Also in 2024, we will be starting new activities in the areas of Exoplanets/Astrobiology, and we will augment our presence in Earth observations with focus on climate change, a topic that is of great interest to us all both as scientists and as citizens of this planet. We are also going to place a bigger emphasis on communicating the amazing science you all do when you visit. A completely redesigned website will do that by giving prominence to science news and easier access to all the valuable initiatives that ISSI offers. Finally, we will explore how to make our activities sustainable. Stay tuned to learn more about all of this in the next few months.

In conclusion, I would like to offer much appreciation to the wonderful ISSI staff, who are dedicated and committed to making your visits pleasant and successful.

And to you all, my best wishes for wonderful festive holidays and a healthy, happy and peaceful New Year.

Antonella Nota

Executive Director

From the Desk of the ISSI Executive Director

Happy summer! Hope you are all surviving the sweltering heat and taking some well deserved rest from the hectic winter activities. At ISSI, we are still working at full capacity, catching up from the pandemic hiatus: teams are visiting, workshops are being held, working groups are coming back, totally immersed in discussing, debating, moving science forward. It is a pleasure to see, finally, the teams meeting in person, but with the added bonus that remote access has become a welcome reality to allow fully inclusive participation, and the technology upgrades have made that addition possible and smooth.

As we are starting to prepare ISSI scientific program for 2024, I solicit your ideas for compelling science topics to be discussed. While the International Teams for 2023 have already been selected, on a variety of exciting scientific topics in the four disciplines that ISSI covers, we have other interesting scientific initiatives that could benefit from your input: Workshops, Forums and Working Groups. See https://www.issibern.ch/program/tools/ to learn more about what each initiative offers.

Now, we want to hear from you.

If you have a compelling science question that you feel would be perfect for a discussion in a neutral, collegial and welcoming atmosphere, such as is offered by ISSI, please do get in touch with me and/or the ISSI Directors and we will work together to identify the tools that would best fit the purpose. ISSI is here to partner with you, the scientific community we serve, and we look forward to hearing from you.

Now a couple of important announcements.

On behalf of the entire ISSI staff, we say farewell to Prof. Georges Meylan, who has left his post as Chair of the ISSI Board of Trustees at the end of June, after seven years of dedication and commitment. Prof. Meylan greatly contributed to make ISSI the strong and stable organization it is today, and for that, ISSI is very grateful.

We also offer a warm welcome to the new Chair of the ISSI Board of Trustees, Prof. Willy Benz, who has started in this new role on July 1st. Prof. Benz, Professor Emeritus of Astrophysics at the University of Bern, is a world expert in exoplanet science. He is the Principal Investigator of the very successful ESA Mission CHEOPS, and is President Elect of the International Astronomical Union. This is the message that Prof. Benz offers to the ISSI scientific community, as he starts his new job at the helm of the ISSI Board of Trustees.

Antonella Nota, 

Executive Director

From the desk of the ISSI Executive Director

Dear ISSI community,

I am absolutely delighted to have an opportunity to connect with you all and start a dialogue that I hope will continue for many years to come.

After one month on the job as Executive Director, I would like to share with you my first thoughts. In this post-pandemic world, more than ever there is the need for a place where scientists can gather and tackle key scientific questions together. ISSI is such a place: a beautiful institution that advances science by facilitating scientific discourse. Scientists are eager to meet in person, and do what they do best: debate, solve problems, move their field forward. ISSI offers a wonderful location and infrastructure to facilitate that, and continues working at full capacity to satisfy your collective requests. This can only happen thanks to a truly outstanding and dedicated staff, and I am honored to work with them.

ISSI Staff (picture taken in January 2023)

January has been a very busy month. In addition to welcoming – on average – three international teams a week, we have selected the 2023 Geiss Fellow: Prof. Sandra Chapman. Prof. Chapman has very impressive scientific credentials and she will greatly enrich ISSI’s scientific atmosphere. We also believe that she will be a fabulous ambassador for ISSI. As an added bonus, she is also an accomplished artist. Connecting art and science has been a passion of mine for many years, so I am truly looking forward to meeting her in person.

We have advertised widely the Call for International Teams. This is one of the pillars at the foundation of ISSI’s activities, and we want to reach out to as many scientists as possible in the disciplines that ISSI covers: astrophysics, heliophysics and plasma, planetary sciences and Earth observations. You can find the call here. Please consider applying, and also help us disseminate it to your communities, for maximum reach. The deadline for submitting proposals is March 16.

Within the ISSI Directorate, we have been discussing what we want ISSI to be in the future. ISSI is on solid financial foundations for the next years to come, and together we can plan for a bright future. You will soon see a refreshed mission statement appearing at the top of our webpages, to inspire us all on what we feel ISSI’s role is. Scientific excellence is our core value, together with openness, inclusion and the desire to build an organization which every scientist wants to visit, and where the most compelling science questions are discussed. You will hear more from me on this topic in the next months.

Finally, I want to conclude by thanking the previous ISSI Executive Director, Prof. Tilman Spohn, for steering ISSI through the tumultuous waters of the COVID pandemic and making ISSI stronger than ever, with a full, robust and interesting scientific program for 2023. We collectively owe him our gratitude for his commitment and dedication to the success of this institution.

To all of you, I hope to meet you in person at some point. Do not hesitate to contact me if you want to provide feedback and suggestions on how ISSI can better serve your community.  Let us know what you love about this organization.  We are eager to hear from you.

Antonella Nota

Executive Director

 

A Word (of farewell) from the ISSI Executive Director

Dear friends of ISSI! Dear visitors of our website!

First of all, let me wish you and your loved ones a Merry Christmas and a successful and Happy New Year!

For us at ISSI an eventful year comes to an end. The first months of 2022 were still impacted by the pandemic and a quasi-lock down with uncertainties about the threat imposed by the Omicron variant of the Corona virus. Visitor numbers were low, in continuation of the low numbers of the previous fall. But in March and April, the ISSI community came back and there was a lot of catching up to do. A record number of 1031 scientists have attended 100 activities (International Teams, Working Groups, Workshops and Fora) in Bern since then, with more than 700 in addition attending from remote. As noted in my September letter, ISSI was running at 150% of its usual capacity and continued to do so for the rest of the year; a workload happily accepted. It felt so good to be back to (almost) normal!

For me, it is time to say good-bye as executive director at the end of a four-year period. A somewhat “schmalzy” pop song from Cologne in Germany catches my feelings: „Niemals geht man so ganz, ein Stück von mir bleibt hier“. The past four years were “speziell” (as the Bernese would say) in various respects, not just because of Corona. There remains my deep appreciation of the ISSI staff and of what we could achieve together!

What we could achieve – beyond our science program – will hopefully take ISSI forward in the future. ISSI’s popular online seminar series was launched with more than 10,000 attendees to date, a more spacious auditorium built named after ISSI’s founding father Johannes Geiss, and the ISSI tools (the workshops, working groups, teams, fora and the visiting scientist’s program) were made more accessible and flexible. Open access publishing was made the norm. ISSI invested into digitalization and web-based communication services with software apps to ease collaboration and the Johannes Geiss auditorium and the three meeting rooms were equipped with state-of-the-art hardware for hybrid meetings which have become the new norm at ISSI. Finally, we were able to put ISSI’s funding on a more stable foundation and improve the social security plans of the staff.

I am sure that ISSI will continue to flourish over the coming years under its new leadership, with Antonella Nota taking over the executive director’s position on January 1st. I am confident that ISSI will keep serving the entire space science community with all the aspects and subfields it served over the past more than 25 years, keeping a good balance and producing excellent research!

 

All the best

Tilman Spohn 

Outgoing ISSI executive director

A Word form the ISSI Executive Director

Dear friends of ISSI!

Dear visitors of our web site,

I hope you had a good and relaxing summer! 

Actually, the Swiss summer as in many parts of Europe was exceptionally sunny, dry and warm. Together with the increased number of unusually warm seasons this decade, it is widely regarded as a consequence of climate change. Quite fittingly, ISSI’s Game Changers Seminar series this spring dealt with aspects of climate change, including the risks to the water budget and how to fight the crisis. Interested, but missed the talks? They are recorded and available here like all the other previous Game Changers Seminar talks. 

This fall – starting this Thursday – the Game Changers Seminar series will be dedicated to “Captivating Cosmology: From the Big Bang to Tomorrow”. The first talk will be by philosopher and physicist Tim Maudlin, who will speak about his ideas on the origin of the relativistic structure of space-time. 

Cosmology and space observation in general received a big boost last Christmas with the successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. The JWST observes at unprecedented resolution and will look deeper into space and thus further back in time then any other telescope before, including the Hubble Space Telescope. ISSI celebrated the first release of JWST images and data on July 12th as the Swiss node of a worldwide network of events. The event at ISSI included presentations by Swiss scientists who either contributed to the JWST hardware or had successfully competed for observing time. The event was broadcast on our Youtube channel and the recording is available. As is the tradition on such happy occasions, the day closed with the Swiss institution of an Apéro reception.

At the moment, ISSI is running its program at an estimated 150% of its capacity, with many weeks with three teams in attendance, plus other meetings in parallel, rather than the usual two. The ISSI directorate is exceedingly thankful to the staff for taking on this extra work load. With the increased number of visitors comes an increased risk of infection, however, and therefore ISSI continues to ask visitors to wear masks on its premises. These measures helped keeping the transmission of COVID under control.

Also in the spring, ISSI was evaluated by a Visiting Committee of internationally renowned scientists, chaired by Dr. Stephan Ulamec of DLR. Their very positive report boosted the motivation of the entire ISSI staff in these demanding times.

With the beginning of September, ISSI once again has a complete staff. Prof. Thierry Dudok de Wit started his term as Space Science director at ISSI on September 1st. Also, Dr. Roland Hohensinn joined the team as Earth Science post-doctoral fellow, working with Earth Science director Michael Rast on climate related remote sensing data and uncertainties in climate variable time series, for which he will use machine-learning methods. On June 1st already, Prof. Rumi Nakamura joined as discipline scientist, helping the institute with her expertise in plasma physics. Finally, on May 15th Dr. Christian Malacaria started his post-doc fellowship in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Christian will work with Astronomy and Astrophysics director Maurizio Falanga on high-energy astrophysics of black holes and neutron stars.

ISSI welcomes the new staff members and is extremely thankful to them for making themselves available. 

Stay safe and come to meet at ISSI anytime soon!
 
All the best
Tilman Spohn  
ISSI executive Director

A Word form the ISSI Executive Director

Dear friends of ISSI!

Dear visitors of our website!

I hope you had a good and healthy start into the New Year!

ISSI like so many others have been hit by the Delta and Omicron Corona virus waves at the end of last year and the first months of the present year. Unfortunately, this time some of us got infected with varying degrees of severeness of symptoms. Now that the numbers have begun to decrease, we prepare to resume our program. Meetings by International Teams and Working Groups have been scheduled for the second half of February onwards and the first Workshop – on the Saturnian System – is planned to be held in May 2022. We are looking forward to busy times because so many events had to be postponed.

The 2022 call for International Team proposals is presently open on the ISSI web site with a deadline of March 17th. This call is jointly with ISSI-Beijing. Another open call is for applications for Visiting Scientists. Researchers of all career stages are invited to submit – at any time of the year – research proposals to apply to spend time at ISSI as a Visiting Scientist. The application is open to all scientists who are actively involved in any of the space science research fields. ISSI has – through its history – supported short visits of individual scientists to its premises in Bern. The many visits over the years by eminent scientists have left a prominent mark on the institute.  Given its success, the directorate has recently decided to make this opportunity more accessible by offering a web interface for applications.  

There have been changes in the ISSI directorate and staff as we entered into the new year. Dr. Anny Cazenave, Earth Science director for nine years, ended her term with the end of 2021 and was followed by Prof. Michael Rast. Mike, as we call him, has long been a friend of the institute serving as one of ESA’s liaisons on the Science Committee. Anny has left her mark on ISSI’s record with eight volumes of the Space Science Series published to date under her direction and one more in the writing. By the end of January, Prof. Álvaro Giménez-Canete ended his service as ISSI discipline scientist. Álvaro has been coordinating Forums in Astronomy for ISSI and has been a great adviser. Finally, Julia Venturini finished her term as ISSI postdoctoral research fellow by the end of the same month. Julia will continue working in exoplanet research. We wish her all the best for her future career.  Anny, Julia and Álvaro will remain friends of the institute!

In January 2022, we started another series of ten talks in the Game Changer series, this time on “Habitability from Galactic to Microbial Scales”. The series started off with a talk by Prof. Antonio Lazcano of the University of Mexico on the “the Origin of Life” which happened to be the 50th seminar talk in the series and with 350 visitors one of the most popular ones. The seminars are recorded and available on our website.

Finally, we are sad to report that Dr. Vittorio Manno, former and first Science Program manager of ISSI between 1995 and 2009 passed away on February 1st, 2022 in Brussels where he lived. He will be remembered by all ISSI staff members who have certainly lost a very elegant, respected colleague and a very dear friend.

Stay safe and hope to meet you all in person at ISSI sometime soon!

All the best

Tilman Spohn 

ISSI executive director

A Word from the ISSI Executive Director

Dear friends of ISSI!

Dear visitors of our website!

As we are heading towards the first Sunday of Advent and the festive season, we could say that this fall has been good to us if it were not for the rising COVID-19 infection numbers of the past few weeks. We had two workshops and a forum – albeit as hybrid events – but with about half of the participants here at the institute while the others followed from remote. Our new audio-video system proofed extremely useful and made participation from remote the second best after being at the institute in person. A software update and recalibration had removed some “nervousness” of the cameras that were chasing speakers and refocusing just a bit too much. The audio continues to be superb. The workshops were the “Venus: Evolution Through Time” workshop in September coordinated by Colin Wilson and colleagues and the “Heliosphere in the Local Interstellar Medium” workshop coordinated by Andrei Bykov and Ruedi von Steiger in November. The latter workshop had the same title as the first ever workshop at ISSI and we were fortunate enough to have two of the participants from then participating in person this time as well. The science has evolved, but the subject continues to be of interest and relevance. The workshop was honoring Johannes Geiss, the founding father of ISSI and the coordinator of the first workshop. 

This past week we hosted a forum on “Ground and Space Based Astronomy” that Álvaro Giménez and Joachim Wambsganss coordinated. Both have been hoping for having the forum fully in person in Bern but after postponing several times, they finally agreed that a hybrid forum was better than postponing once again. For Joachim, the event marked an endpoint of his service as an ISSI director as he had left end of September after four years of service. The ISSI directorate and staff had thanked and congratulated him during the first combined directorate and staff meeting that month and wished him all the best for the future. Negotiations with a successor to Joachim are ongoing now.

In addition to the two workshops and the forum, we saw ten teams meet at the institute and expect four more to come in December. Moreover, two working groups “Extant subsurface Life on Mars? Science, Tools & Missions Together” and “Towards a Universal Tracers Portal in Astrobiology” kicked-off their activities through two online meetings over several days. The first of the two is a joint effort by ISSI, ISSI Beijing and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research CIFAR. 

The Game Changer Seminar Series has been continuing successfully every Thursday at 17:00. As we do have a significant number of participants from the United States, we will pause this week for the Thanksgiving holiday and resume next week. Please see our website for the talks scheduled up to Christmas and for the recordings of the past seminars. We are planning the series resume in the new year when we will focus on an interdisciplinary subject with contributions from all fields of space sciences that ISSI covers.

Finally, let me report briefly on the ISSI yearly dinner that was held at the Hotel Bellevue Palace with 104 guests present including many of the participants of the Heliosphere workshop. The highlight of the evening was a lecture by Nobel laureate Michel Mayor on the continuing hunt for exoplanets and the search for traces of extraterrestrial life.

Let me close this letter by pointing to the Pro ISSI online talk this coming Wednesday at 18:15 on “A Warming Indian Ocean on Planet Earth: Changes in Ocean Circulation, Sea Level and Heat Content” by 2020 Johannes Geiss Fellow Weiqing Han of the University of Colorado.

On behalf of the institute, let me wish you and your loved ones a peaceful festive season! And, if you have not yet received your vaccination or your booster shot consider getting it as soon as possible thus helping to protect yourself and your fellow people.

All the best

Tilman Spohn 

A Word form the ISSI Executive Director

Dear friends of ISSI!

Dear visitors of our website!

It almost feels like a relaunch! Since the beginning of this month of September, we have visitors again at ISSI. We started off with an International Team in the first week of the month (Sept 6–10) working on plasmas in the vicinity of comets and of Mars and this week (Sept 13–17) we host a team working on Pulsars. These are the first in person team meetings at ISSI in 1.5 years, since March 2020! There will be more International Teams coming to ISSI in September and the following months as you can see in our calendar which is quite full. Moreover, this second week of September (13–17) we are hosting the first ISSI Workshop since the Deep Earth Interior Workshop a year ago! The subject of the present workshop is the Evolution of the Interior of Venus. The subject is particularly timely since earlier this year NASA and ESA chose THREE missions to Venus for the coming years. Many of the workshop conveners and participants are involved in these missions, in particular in the ESa EnVision mission and the NASA Veritas mission but the NASA DaVinci mission is also represented.

Impression of the ongoing Workshop on Venus including remote participation

The Venus workshop had been postponed two times and the workshop and book project was finally launched adopting the new alternative scheme that ISSI had designed to better cope with COVID-19 Implications. The scheme starts the project off with an online meeting and has the in person meeting in the flow of the project when book chapters have been devised and/or (partly) written. The workshop is then used to discuss the chapters and their science content and the relations between chapters. We find this week that this works very well and motivates lively discussions. Because of COVID still being around the workshop is hybrid with about half of the participants joining remotely. We find that the investment in our state-of-the-art audio and video system pays off and eliminates some of the major disadvantages of hybrid meetings, such as discussion in the room cannot easily be followed from remote. If those speculating that the hybrid format will continue to be with us for some time are right then ISSI can say that it is well equipped for the task.

Also, in this month of September we will resume the Game Changers Online Seminar series with a talk on Venus Exploration by Richard Ghail from the University of London, one of the masterminds of the ESA EnVision mission. The program until the end of the year is still under development – we admit that we are a bit late – but should be in its final form by the end of this week. Stay tuned! We will cover a wide range of subjects from astrophysics and planetary science to climate change and astrobiology.

Of course, nobody can say with great confidence how the situation with COVID will evolve, in particular in Switzerland. But we hope that we can continue with our program even through coming the fall and winter. We have a set of rules at the institute and require visitors to be either vaccinated, recovered from the disease or negatively tested.

With my best regards

 

Tilman Spohn

 

A Word form the ISSI Executive Director

Dear friends of ISSI,

Dear visitors of our web site,

As we proceed into the summer infection rates are pleasingly low although the Delta variant of the virus is causing concern. Activities at ISSI are picking up for September onwards with team meetings and the planned workshop on “Venus: Evolution Through Time”. We at ISSI certainly hope that the increasing number of vaccinations will keep Delta at bay and allow activities to continue in the fall and winter. 

Here at the institute things are evolving with significant changes in the staff and the directorate now and ahead of us! Look for spotlights in due time as we say farewell and welcome our new members or old friends in new responsibilities:

First of all, let me report that at its last meeting the ISSI Board of Trustees has awarded Prof. Roger-Maurice Bonnet with the ISSI honorary directorship for life. Prof Bonnet thus follows in the footsteps of ISSI’s founding father Prof. Johannes Geiss. The board thus acknowledges the “pivotal role and expressing deep gratitude for his steady and effective support and leadership that has made ISSI a beacon in space science.” The ISSI staff and directors congratulate Prof. Bonnet on this highly-deserved honor. Prof. Bonnet is in our Spotlight this week!

By the end of the month, Prof. Ruedi von Steiger will retire from his positions at the University of Bern and at ISSI and will be followed by Prof. Maurizio Falanga. Maurizio, known to many of you as our Science Program Manager will be followed as of September 15th by Dr. Mark Sargent. He is a lecturer in Astronomy at the University of Sussex board and presently on sabbatical leave visiting with the University of Geneve

ISSI is deeply thankful to Ruedi von Steiger who has served the institute right from the beginning. His continued service has fundamentally helped to make ISSI what it is today. We will honor Ruedi on July 29th at 17:00 CDT with a special issue of the weekly Game Changers Seminar.

Finally, the ISSI board of Trustees at its last meeting decided to offer the position of ISSI Earth Science director to Prof. Michael Rast. Prof.  Rast will join the ISSI directorate as of Jan 1st, 2022 and will follow in the footsteps of Prof. Anny Cazenave. Prof. Rast is known to ISSI since the beginning of the Earth Science program at the institute having served as ex-officio member of the ISSI Science Committee.

Stay safe and I hope to see you all back in person at ISSI sometime soon!

Tilman Spohn

ISSI executive Director

A Word form the ISSI Executive Director

Dear friends of ISSI,

Dear visitors of our web site,

As you all know, we have entered into the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The institute continues to be a quiet place with staff working mostly from home as is required by Swiss law. Visits to ISSI require testing on the way to Switzerland and back and I – for one – have gotten quite used to having regular PCR tests. To date, none of the staff has been infected, fortunately, and some of us have received their (first) vaccination shots. We – like everybody else – hope that the vaccination campaign speeds up and that indeed people can be vaccinated by the summer or by the end of the season.

While the institute remains a quiet place ISSI activities are continuing (compare our Annual Report just published). International Teams and Working Groups continue to be meeting online. The “Global Change in Africa” workshop was held in January with most participating remotely as was the “Tipping Points in the Earth’s Climate”- Forum the same months. The “Venus: Evolution through Time” as well as the “The Heliosphere in the Local Interstellar Medium” and the “Strong Gravitational Lensing” workshop teams are proceeding following the new alternative scheme for the workshop-to-book process in which the chapter writing starts after an online kick-off and with regular online tag-ups. The in-person workshop will be organized as the pandemic allows in the flow of the project and will be largely devoted to discussions of the then matured subject. Other workshops and forums are still postponed, however, waiting for the end of the crisis.

Our online seminar series about missions that changed the game in the space sciences has ended with the month of March, after 28 lectures had been given. Recordings of these are available here on our website and continue to be downloaded often. The ISSI directorate decided to continue the series albeit changing gears to some degree. Rather than presenting missions, we will during the months of May to July look at “Ideas and Findings about the Solar System, the Universe and our Terrestrial Environment”. The first talk will be on tipping points in the Earth’s climate on May 6thand we will then proceed to present a wide variety of subjects in Earth, Solar and Planetary sciences and Astrophysics (see the schedule here). We are extremely proud to have been able to recruit leaders of their fields as speakers, including physics Nobel laureates Adam Riess and Reinhard Genzel. Come and join us for these extraordinary events!

Stay safe and I hope to meet you all in person at ISSI sometime soon!

Tilman Spohn

 

ISSI executive Director