Early career representative column: Young scientist and student paper activities at URSI GASS 2020

Abstract

2020 was a challenging year, with COVID-19 measures across the globe posing severe restrictions on people moving around and meeting in person. This also affected our scientific community. Many organizers of scientific events had to cancel or postpone their events. Among them was URSI, which decided to postpone the URSI GASS 2020 to 2021, hoping that doing so would allow the URSI scientists to meet in person again or, at least, a significant fraction of them in the case of a hybrid event. As this decision was made after the submission deadline, not everything was or could be postponed by one year. In view of timeliness, all authors were given the opportunity to have their contribution included in the proceedings of the URSI GASS 2020. Young Scientist (YS) Awards were also granted, and the Student Paper Competition (SPC) was held, with the SPC finally conducted as a virtual event. In this ECR column, we feature two short reports on the YS Awards and the SPC. These reports were kindly provided by the Young Scientist Panel, consisting of Phil Wilkinson (Chair), Peter van Daele, Stefan J. Wijnholds, and Inge Lievens; and Sembiam R. Rengarajan (Chair of the SPC), respectively.