The PACE, in collaboration with the ESO, organized an “ALMA Data
Processing Workshop” held in Lisbon on 5th, 6th, and 7th of December and funded by RadioNet consortium (website:
http://www.iastro.pt/research/conferences/alma2017/). The goal of the workshop was to bring together all the community which were planning to use ALMA data in the future, and join them together for different hands-on sessions. The organizers, together with expert invited speakers from the ARC nodes of UK and Netherlands, guided the participants from raw to reduced
data, in two days and half of full work.
A total of 19 astronomers attended the workshop, coming from ten different countries: Pakistan, Greece, Turkey, Croatia, Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, UK, Spain, and of course Portugal. As expected, the most represented communities were Portugal and Spain, for logistics reasons. 37% of the participants were female, and more than half of the participants were PhD or Master students. Beyond the participants, the organizers invited two expert speakers from the ARC node of the UK, Dr. George Bendo, and from Netherlands, Dr. Ciriaco Goddi, which work as ALMA data analysts in their respective ALMA nodes.
An important aspect to underline is that almost 63% of the participants were not experts in interferometry, and approached the topic for the first time. This is very positive, as the main goals of the workshop was exactly to attract young scientists towards the use of interferometric data.
We hope that in the future PACE will continue this path, organizing other events, with the idea to help the European radio community.
[RadioNet has received funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the grant agreement No 730562]