A new year of ideas and expectatives begins while we are still gathering the results produced at the end of 2017. Rene Oudmaijer, my PhD main supervisor, came to visit ESAC at the end of December what resulted in a few days of intense hands-on work. Together we finished outlining the first segment of the project and planned for the future. Now the next milestone is Gaia Data Release 2 (DR2), planned for the second half of April, when we will face the new technical difficulties arising from a new catalogue. Therefore, the more we can do beforehand the better.
Shortly before Rene’s visit I attended, together with Alice, the ESAC Data Analysis and Statistics Workshop. We learnt a lot about Bayesian Statistics, Machine Learning and Python programming in statistics. The idea is to implement the new knowledge to the project as soon as possible, as it will be of the utmost importance in order to describe the results that will be obtained with DR2.
It is quite important to have an impact on the community. Hence, this January I presented the work I did during my first year of PhD at the Journal Club of the Astrobiology Center in Madrid. We plan to go to the Olympian Symposium in Greece at the end of May and, once in the deep Spanish summer, we will go to the national Spanish astronomy meeting in Salamanca.
Nonetheless, the event that made me happier was the public talk I gave about star formation at the Isabel the España college residence. It was heart-warming to see the reaction of the general public and the interest aroused.