With NAM cancelled in the RAS's 200th anniversary year, the RAS wanted to give early career researchers the opportunity to share their work in a format that is freely available to all. Led by the new RAS Early Careers Network (ECN), 272 students, post-docs, graduates and young professionals uploaded digital posters in September.
Aine O’Brien, ECN Chair said: "After an awesome 2 weeks of tweets and interactions, and an intense 8 weeks of judging, we are now delighted to announce the winners and honourable mentions. The standard of posters was exceptionally high and we were amazed by the vast number of topics covered, from cubesats to education and outreach, from black holes to seismology of the Earth! We are so grateful to everyone who took the time to participate."
Douglas Boubert, RAS ECN Vice Chair said “We had entrants from 47 countries, which is the fantastic bonus of holding an online poster exhibition! We were especially pleased that 65% of our entrants were students, with 24 of them being undergraduates!”
A team of over 20 senior judges spanning Astronomy and Geophysics spent eight weeks reading over the submissions and we are thrilled to announce the following five winners, (all of whom are postgraduate students):
Shannon Jones (Reading University, UK): The visual Complexity of Coronal Mass Ejections
Heidi Thiemann (Open University, UK): Red novae candidates: An investigation of long-period near-contact giant eclipsing binaries
Isobel Romero-Shaw (Monash University, Australia): Searching for Eccentricity: signatures of dynamical formation in the first gravitational-wave transient catalogue of LIGO and Virgo
Núria Jordana-Mitjans (Bath University, UK): What is the role of the magnetic fields in GRBs outflows? The case of GRB 190114C
Soheb Mandhai (University of Leicester, UK): Extragalactic Wanderers: Migration of Compact Binaries from Their Host Galaxies
We would also like to extend congratulations to the following runners up, whose posters also impressed the judges and therefore deserve an honourable mention:
Nathan Adams (Oxford University, UK): Population Studies of Galaxies in the Early Universe
Maeve Doyle (University College Dublin, ROI): Building Ireland’s First Satellite
Ezequiel Gonzalez (Recent graduate, Leanspace/ISU, France): Atmosphere Spectroscopy of Gas Giant Exoplanets
Mara Leite (Westminster University, UK): Analysis of Human-Commensal Microbes at a Mars Analogue Habitat
Anne Buckner (Post-doc, Exeter University, UK): INDICATE: A novel tool to robustly study the star formation history of a cluster
You can view the posters here. We hope this will become an annual event, so stay tuned to take part next year!