ECOLI: Early Career Origin of Life Initiative
If you attended the exciting “Re-Conceptualizing the Origins of Life” conference last year, you’ll probably remember a bunch of us talking about organizing an early-career workshop. Well, the time has come to put that idea into action! Now introducing ECOLI: The “Early Career Origin of Life Initiative”. Because at least four of us are from Arizona State University, we thought it would be easier (logistically) to host this workshop in Arizona. Originally, we had thought that a 2-week workshop would be ample time to establish lasting collaborations and friendships, but others expressed that a 1-week workshop would be more agreeable with other responsibilities.
Speaking of Arizona, it would need to be a winter workshop… not a summer one! We are looking to target January 2017… unless there is another group who would rather host the workshop at their local institution. If that’s the case, we could aim for a summer.
Several of us are still very much interested in putting a workshop like this together. It would be absolutely fantastic to build a community among the early career scientists! We all work on very exciting things, and this will give us a chance to learn each other’s perspectives and invent new routes of investigation. But since this is a grassroots effort, there are still some things that need to be agreed upon! These are:
- Should we do this in the Phoenix-ish, Arizona area? (If so, then it will be a winter workshop)
- If not, then is anyone else willing to take the initiative on hosting?
- Should it be one or two weeks long?
Please, feel free to jump in on the discussion! The more voices that can actively participate, the sooner this can become a reality!
After talking with my cohorts here at ASU, it might be easier to tag this workshop in the week just before the next MOL workshop. This way, travel will be much easier since we can fly early for the MOL workshop, rather than for a separate thing altogether. This will give us early career people a chance to prime each other on many of the themes and ideas that will be discussed during the following week. To summarize, we would like to have:
– A week-long workshop the week just before the next MOL workshop
– At a nearby location to the MOL workshop, depending on where that will be
– Participants will give primers/introductory talks on the topic that is most important to their research (and origin of life in general)
– So we can all be on the same page for the MOL workshop
– And everyone will be acquainted with each other so nobody will be a stranger!
If you’re an early career scientist, what are your thoughts on something like this? Are you down? Discuss below!