All participants are invited to join the icebreaker reception on Sunday, 8 September, 16:30–18:30.

This is a short session to address main organization points needed for chairs of the scientific sessions. All chairs (experienced and first-timer) are invited to take part in this session. There will be time for Q&A at the end of the training.

Free slots available.

- Have you ever overheard a comment that you knew was not right but did not know what to say?
- Are you ever the one who feels the need to "laugh" at a "joke" that is more harmful than funny?
- Do you ever find yourself heading home after work thinking, "I should have said..."?
- Would you like to have some specific skills designed to help interrupt break-room gossip?

This Bystander Intervention workshop is an in-person, interactive workshop that is designed to engage participants in conversation about difficult topics including, but not limited to, racial-, sexual-, religion-, age-, gender-, and sexuality-based harassment, bullying, and exclusion.


The workshop's goals are:

- Raise awareness of barriers to helping.
- Raise awareness of helpful behaviors.
- Increase desire and motivation to help.
- Develop skills and confidence to help.
- Ensure the safety and well-being of attendees

Workshop agenda:

1. Introduction and Brave Spaces
2. Goals
3. Theories and Definitions
4. Experiences
5. Social and Cultural Identifiers
6. Bystander Intervention Action Model
7. Skills Training
8. Team Agreement
9. Q&A

When: Sunday, 8 September 2024, 13:00–17:00

Where: Room Mercury - Konferenzraum III

Who: Organized by the Europlanet Diversity Committee, the workshop trainer is Dr. Moses Milazzo.

How to attend: This workshop has a capacity of 27 participants, if you wish to attend, please sign up at https://terminplaner.dfn.de/y4XuZOdLMZ8WpCSt

In case your plans have changed and you cannot attend anymore, please go back to this form and update your attendance, so that other people can join.

If you have any questions, please contact Solmaz Adeli.

The Opening Ceremony provides an overview of the forthcoming week of EPSC as well as providing an opportunity for the Local Organizing Committee and the Europlanet Society to welcome all delegates. We will also present some details on the Society and opportunities for delegates to join and help build the Society.
The Opening Ceremony will end with the prize lectures of the 2024 Paolo Farinella prize recipient and joint winners of the Europlanet Prize for Public Engagement 2023.

There is a chance that, like me, you dreamed of becoming a scientist as a kid. Making groundbreaking discoveries, exploring the world, creating new knowledge: it sounded like the most wonderful career path I could think of. And although being a scientist is indeed quite wonderful, there is also a chance that as you progressed in your career you found that the reality of your childhood dreams is not quite what you expected. You probably didn’t make a Nobel-prize worthy discovery yet and maybe that professorship still looks quite far away. And — perhaps most surprisingly — you found out that academia is not necessarily the meritocracy it claims to be. Not so long ago, the ivory tower of academia was an impenetrable fortress inhabited by the old boys network and in some places, it still is. So perhaps it is no wonder that you haven't bagged that Nobel prize yet: there are outside forces you cannot control.

But: things are changing! Compared to 30 years ago, the diversity of the planetary science community has skyrocketed! To illustrate this I will show some preliminary results of our analysis into the participants of the Ada Lovelace workshop — a biannual workshop for geodynamical modellers — to demonstrate the evolving diversity of the geodynamics community specifically. For example, at the first Ada Lovelace workshop in 1987, 10.5% of the participants were women, but in 2022 that percentage had risen to 36.7%. This is a marked improvement, but at the same time still a long way off from an equal gender balance (not to mention gender diversity or indeed other minorities). To continue this upward trajectory, I will point out different initiatives to pursue both as an individual and as a community to make sure we continue to diversify our community and provide a welcoming space for everyone.

Together we can continue to dream of both a more just, equal, diverse, and inclusive environment and of those world-view-changing discoveries we are yet to make. Forget the sky - that’s not the limit! We planetary scientists go way beyond that! Don’t even shoot for the stars: shoot higher! Together, we can do it.

Iris van Zelst

After a BSc in Earth Sciences and an MSc in Geophysics from Utrecht University, Iris obtained her PhD from ETH Zürich in 2020 on her research on modelling tsunamigenic earthquakes on different time scales. She worked as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Leeds studying the thermal evolution of subduction zones and then moved to the German Aerospace Center in 2021 to pursue research into the geodynamics and seismology of Venus. She will continue this line of research as a Patience Cowie Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh starting in 2025.

Besides research, Iris is an avid advocate for diversity and inclusion in the planetary and geosciences and she is an outreach enthousiast. She hosts the YouTube series Science Sisters, where she interviews guests on their different career paths and any issues they have faced. She is also the owner and creative director of The Silly Scientist: a new startup company specialising in sciency games. As such, she is in the process of publishing her first game: QUARTETnary - the card game about the geological time scale, which was a big success on Kickstarter earlier this year.

The social event of EPSC2024 is taking place at the Museum für Naturkunde in the centre of Berlin on Wednesday, 11 September 2024. The access to the venue will be possible from 19:30. The official start of the event is at 20:00. The social event ends at 23:00. The "Museum für Naturkunde – Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science" is an integrated research museum within the Leibniz Association. It is one of the most important research institutions worldwide in the areas of biological and geological evolution and biodiversity. The social event will take place in the famous dinosaur hall of the museum. Guides will be available to give small tours through the museum and explain the objects in the exhibition.

The deadline for registering for the social event is Wednesday, 28 August, 23:59 CEST (if not booked out earlier).

Registered social event attendees are requested to pick up an access ticket wristband for the event at the information & name badge pickup of the conference venue (Henry Ford Building). The wristband pickup is possible on Tuesday, 10 September from 12:00 to 18:00, and on Wednesday, 11 September from 08:30 to 17:00.