I’m heading to Boston, Massachusetts, (well, Cambridge, really) today for a 3-day astronomy “bootcamp,” and I’m pretty darned excited. You may have read about this workshop in Managing Editor Chris Raymond’s forum post.
The Knight Foundation (the premier journalism organization in the United States) and the Kavli Foundation (an international organization dedicated to advancing science) host science journalism workshops every year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Because Kavli focuses mainly on three areas — astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience — the bootcamps switch between these topics. This year it’s astrophysics. This 3-day intensive workshop encompasses lectures by top astrophysicists from MIT and Harvard University in addition to a trip to the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatory. The application process brought me back to graduate school applications — my resume, a statement of purpose, three recommendation letters, and four writing samples. And when I heard that I was one of 15 journalists accepted, I was pretty thrilled. So from Wednesday morning through Friday afternoon, my brain will be like a sponge, absorbing information about the following topics:
Galaxy clusters and dark matter (Paul Schechter, MIT)
General cosmology (Robert Kirshner, Harvard)
Radio astronomy and black holes (James Moran, Harvard)
Interstellar gas (Alyssa Goodman, Harvard)
Extrasolar planets (Joshua Winn, MIT)
Cosmology and relativity (Edmund Bertschinger, MIT)
Low-mass stars (Adam Burgasser, MIT)
X-ray astronomy (Claude Canizares, Chandra X-ray Observatory)
Human spaceflight (Dava J. Newman, MIT)
Distant galaxy clusters (Megan Donahue, Michigan State University)
Detecting dark matter (Peter Fisher, MIT)
I’ll try to write a few blogs and take a few “Where in the World is Astronomy?” pictures while I’m out there. And if you’re curious about the workshop, you can read more about it at its website.