Mission Statement

The Astronomy Graduate Student Congress, or Astro Grad Congress, aims to bring together astronomy graduate students from across the United States to promote interdepartmental discourse. We believe that positive change can come from sharing experiences or resources, and gaining broader perspectives. Our goal is to facilitate communication in between early career scientists, and collect, gather, and centralize information to enhance accessibility to knowledge.

Structure

The Astro Grad Congress is composed of one or two graduate student representatives per Astronomy department¹, who meet three times a year on zoom. The steering committee organizes general body meetings and meets every other week. Steering committee meetings are public to all reps who want to participate.

Origins

This project was inspired and grown by discussions and brainstorming workshops at the dotAstronomy 12 conference hosted at the Center for Computational Astrophysics of the Flatiron Institute in September 2023. From then, PhD students Lou Baya Ould Rouis (Boston University), Yasmeen Asali (Yale), Sebastian Monzon (Yale), and Lindsay House (UT Austin) worked on creating a platform that would facilitate communication between Astronomy departments, with support from Dr. Charlotte Olsen (City Tech) and Dr. Tom Rice (AAS Education). Our first Astro Grad Congress was held in April 2024, with representatives from over 20 schools across the country.

List of Schools represented

Please reach out if you would like to represent your department.

• CUNY
• University of Chicago
• Vanderbilt University
• University of Pittsburgh
• University of Florida
• Clemson University
• Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
• UC Santa Cruz
• University of Wisconsin at Madison
• Tufts
• The Ohio State University
• Caltech
• UT Austin
• Boston University
• University of Hawaii
• NYU
• UC San Diego
• UC Los Angeles
• MIT
• University of Washington
• Harvard
• Yale
• Johns Hopkins University