Announcement of the VLBI in the GLAST Era Workshop

Dear colleague,

on April 23/24, 2007, a scientific workshop will be held at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, USA. The primary goal of this meeting will be to bring together experts in AGN research from the Gamma-ray and Very-Long-Baseline-Interferometry communities. With the launch of GLAST, we will be entering a new era of AGN research in which VLBI will play a major role. At this workshop, we want to discuss ideas and strategies to maximize the scientific output from synergistic VLBI and GLAST observations of blazars and other AGN. Therefore, the title of the workshop will be "VLBI in the GLAST era".

The meeting is restricted to a maximum number of 70-90 participants, so if you are interested to attend, please register as soon as possible by replying to this email. The list of confirmed invited speakers includes Bob Hartman, Dan Homan, Jim Ulvestad, Steve Ritz, David Band, Markos Georganopoulos, Jim Moran, Matt Lister, Margo Aller, Yuri Kovalev, Joe Helmboldt, Svetlana Jorstad, Chuck Dermer, Andrei Lobanov, Ann Wehrle and Gino Tosti. The scientific program and a lot of extra information is available on the workshop website: http://glast.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/resources/meetings/lat/agn_april07/

A limited amount of time is reserved in the preliminary schedule for contributed presentations. If you wish to present a scientific project in form of a contributed talk or poster, please indicate the title of your presentation and give a short abstract.

We hope to make a lot of significant progress on a variety of issues within the scope of this meeting, but the general spirit of the workshop will be informal. Most sessions are planned to end with a panel discussion, in which we want to give everybody the chance to participate actively. Note that the time of the workshop is chosen to be conveniently well before the first round of GLAST science proposals. You will have the chance to talk to GLAST experts about technical and observational aspects of your proposals and at the same time discuss with VLBI experts about the setup of complementary VLBA-, EVN-, GMVA- or other Very-Long-Baseline-Interferometry observations. A major goal of this workshop is to lay the ground for successful new collaborations between Gamma-Ray and VLBI researchers in the GLAST era and, therefore, the meeting will offer plenty of opportunities for discussions. There will be no registration fee.

Sincerely,

Matthias Kadler

on behalf of the SOC: M. Kadler, K.I. Kellermann, A.P. Marscher, J.E. McEnery, E. Ros, R.M. Sambruna, G.B. Taylor, D.J. Thompson, K.A. Weaver & J.A. Zensus