Description
The IAU working group for professional-amateur relations in astronomy (Pro-Am WG) wants to reach connect professional and amateur astronomers, with the aim of promoting research collaborations, delivering workshops, and promoting and facilitating the integration of professional astronomers within amateur societies, for example, via the IAU Office for Astronomy Outreach (OAO) programme "Meet the IAU Astronomer!".
The Pro-Am WG was formed in April 2021 as a WG under the Executive Committee. The IAU Strategic Plan 2020-30 stated that connecting professional and amateur astronomers was one of its goals for the decade (see Strategic Plan, Goal 4). This is also an integral mission of the IAU Office for Astronomy Outreach (OAO).
For the first century of its existence, the IAU has had very few formal contacts with the much larger body of amateurs around the world. This changed in 2019 with a successful one-day workshop for amateurs in Brussels, followed by the formation of the new Working Group in April 2021 for professional-amateur relations in astronomy. At the present time, no-one has a clear idea of how many amateurs there are in the world, but it is likely to be of the order of a million individuals, some two orders of magnitude greater than the number of active professionals in the IAU.
An initial Organizing Committee (OC) for the new WG was established as follows: John Hearnshaw (New Zealand, co-chair), Lina Canas (Japan and Portugal), Beatriz Garcia (Argentina), Stella Kafka (USA), Yuko Kakazu (USA and Japan, secretary), Moein Mosleh (Iran), Mirjana Povic (Ethiopia), Kazuhiro Sekiguchi (Japan), Boonrucksar Soonthornthum (Thailand), Aniket Sule (India, co-chair), Timothy Spuck (USA), Ilya Usoskin (Finland, EC liaison), Antonia Varela (Spain). At the end of 2021, Povic and Kafka both resigned from the WG. They were replaced by Mayra Lebron (Puerto Rico) and Clementina Sasso (Italy).