LSC Academic Advisory Committee (LAAC)

The LAAC now has a website, laac.docs.ligo.org, where you can find out who is currently on the committee, our current projects, and other useful information for students, postdocs, and other new members of the collaboration.

Chat to us and your fellow early career researchers on our mattermost channel: chat.ligo.org/ligo/channels/laac

The LAAC was created back in the Initial LIGO era towards the end of S5 as the LSC was beginning to rapidly grow. It initially consisted of appointed members: a few senior members and one postdoc and one grad student representative. As the collaboration grew even further, and the role of this new committee became better defined, it expanded to include two student and two postdoc representatives, with all positions being elected.

We are the elected representatives to serve as the voice for the students and postdocs when it comes to policies and decisions made by the LSC Directorate and Council. Our job is to be advocates on behalf of students and postdocs. To do so, we need to know about your experiences as junior members of the LSC. Please share with us your concerns, desires, and what you like best and worst!

The responsibilities of the LSC Academic Advisory Committee are to:

• Serve as an advocate with the LSC Council and Executive Committee for the educational aspects across all of LSC for undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs.
• Provide a mechanism to gather and evaluate information concerning LSC's educational program and recommend improvements to the LSC Council.
• Work with LSC collaborating institutions to help ensure that the postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates associated with LSC get a broad education, quality mentoring and appropriate recognition for their work.

The LAAC reports annually to the LSC Council on items relevant to the Collaboration's plans and activities for education and training for students and postdocs in the LSC.

You can reach all of the members of the LAAC by email at laac@ligo.org.

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LAAC presence at LVK meetings

• LAAC events at September 2024 LVK meeting in Barcelona, Spain
• September 2024 LVK Meeting website
• LVK Meeting main Wiki page
• DCC page

Many of the efforts of the LSC Academic Advisory Committee in its early years of existence revolved around making the LVK meetings more student friendly. The LAAC initiatives that have now become integral and expected parts of today's LVK meetings are the following:

• Poster Session
• Poster Prize -- an award is given to the best instrumentation and data analysis/astrophyics student posters, respectively
• Tutorials -- a dedicated session for postdocs and students to teach each other, in an interactive way, about research topics or resources they find useful
• Social event -- exclusively for postdocs and students
• Networking lunch -- this hasn't yet become a mainstay of every meeting, but we'd like it to! An opportunity to explicitly have lunch with people you don't know, senior and junior.

Links to previous LVK meeting LAAC pages:

• LAAC events at March 2024 LVK meeting at LSC/Baton Rouge
• LAAC events at September 2023 LVK meeting

Resources

We've compiled, and in some cases created, various resources that you should find helpful at different stages in your learning and progression through career.

For learning about being a member of the LSC:

• The LSC Beginner's Guide

For seeing what your peers are researching:

• Thesis database -- list of LSC students and tentative thesis titles (Help on managing entries in the database.)
• Past Ph.D. students list -- names and links to theses of those who have graduated from the LSC

For learning more about gravitational waves:

• Educational Resources - recommended books, summer schools, and select recorded lectures
• Tutorials

For job hunting:

• Job Postings -- a list of all of the job and fellowship announcements that are advertised to lsc-all
• Fellowships -- a list of fellowships with regular calls (mostly once a year)
• CV and job application guidance -- advice on how to write a CV, prepare job applications and write recommendation letters
• Recognition for collaboration contributions
• Undergraduate Resources - undergrad summer research opportunities in gravitational waves

Projects and resources in various states of development

We are always looking for enthusiastic volunteers to help us revive old projects or create new ones to best suit the needs of today's students and postdocs. Here's a partial list of initiatives, some of which we're actively working on, some of which are in hibernation after a go in the past. Please write to us if you'd like to help!

• Master's students list -- we're working with LSC IT people to get this set up properly
• Gravitational waves course development
• Alumni tracking and networking
• Peer mentoring program

Archives of past LAAC projects

• LIGO Student Fellowship Program -- a competitive fellowship to spend a year doing research at one of the LIGO observatories (no longer in existence as of 2015)
• Author credit issues -- a discussion in 2012 for the Program Advisory Committee

Resources for the LAAC members

• Quick links for new committee members
• LAAC Meeting Minutes -- Current call times: Every second Tue, 2pm US central, 3pm US east, 6pm BRT, 8pm UK, 9pm central Europe, (Wed) 5am Australie (east) - next calls: 5th of May, 19th of May, 2nd of June...
• Example reminder update email for the Thesis Database
• Lessons learned / Planning for future LAAC sessions at LVC meetings (tutorials/retreat) - wiki link
• poster session logistics
• vocabulary
• how to upload my poster and sparkler slide to the dcc

LAAC Web Utilities

• - advanced search
• WebTopicList - all topics in alphabetical order
• WebChanges - recent topic changes in this web
• WebNotify - subscribe to an e-mail alert sent when topics change
• WebRss, WebAtom - RSS and ATOM news feeds of topic changes
• WebStatistics - listing popular topics and top contributors
• WebPreferences - preferences of this web