Greetings to all friends of ISSI-BJ and welcome to the Year of Tiger which is the starting point of the post-pandemic era. Even though Omicron is a surprise to us who were expecting the world will return to normal by the beginning of 2022, there are signs that COVID-19 will soon be over if we can all act cautiously and cooperate closely. Indeed, ISSI-BJ is making the plan to not just recover the lost time but to strengthen our service to the International scientific community by applying the lessons learned.
For example, as you might notice, we have been keeping ourselves busy by organizing a number of online seminar series reaching out to different members of the space science family. We began by introducing the “On Things to Come” webinar with focus on ongoing and upcoming missions in space astronomy, planetary exploration, solar-terrestrial physics and Earth observations. Subsequently, the “1001 Space Nights” with outreaching talks given by women scientists to attract the attention of female students to STEM and space research, and the “Space Science Bazaar” with early-career researches as speakers in mind have been initiated. All three of them are doing well and a new one called “Topical Reviews” built on joint online seminars of Chinese universities and their international counterparts will kick off in February.
It is believed that such form of distant learning and information exchange, though not perfect, can still be a useful means of scientific communication, in lieu of in-personal meetings. It is likely that, hand-in-hand with the core program of International Team, Forum, Workshop and Working Group, the online seminars developed over the last two years will be an important component for ISSI-BJ to build long-term partnership in the pursuit of scientific excellence on the basis of diversity, equity, inclusion and neutrality.
While we are optimistic, we cannot be absolutely sure of to what extent we can carry out the activities we would like to do in the coming months. But one thing for certain is that we will do our best in serving as a much needed channel of scientific creativity and mutual understanding of space scientists and organizations, whether East and West, or North and South. We will be bold and persistent in our attempts to connect different parts and different sides of space experts to maximize their scientific returns and to optimize their missions to explore new frontiers.
In closing let me wish everyone a happy lunar new year and be healthy and strong as a tiger, and please don’t forget to join us at ISSI-BJ. There are really many, many things we should do and can do together to make peace on Earth and cooperation in space a reality.
Sincerely,
Wing-Huen Ip
Executive Director, ISSI-BJ
