April 11-12, 2018
The EPO Standing Committee met on April 11-12, 2018 at the Mackay School of Earth Sciences and Engineering, University of Nevada Reno. The attendees for part or all of the meeting included: John Louie (Chair), Anna Courtier, Bob Detrick, Alex Nikulin, Eric Riggs, John Taber , Bob Wegner,. Remote attendee: Lora Bleacher, Wendy Bohon, Tammy Bravo,Donna Charlevoix,Mladen Dordevic, Perle Dorr, Michael Hubenthal, and Mike Thorne.
The meeting began with a review of the minutes and action items from the previous meeting, followed by a presentation and discussion on EPO program highlights over the past six months and the staff priorities for the next 6 months. An update was provided on planning for the 2018 IRIS workshop in Albuquerque, including the EPO-related sessions. This was followed by limited information on the status of the NGEO proposal, along with discussion of NSF opportunities not specifically related to NGEO. This was followed by a presentation and discussion of the IRIS REU program, including suggestions for how to celebrate the 20thanniversary of the program, and plans for the renewal proposal due in August. Next came a demonstration of a new Web application (Station Monitor) that provides easy viewing of place-based seismic data.
After lunch and a brief tour of some of the School facilities, there was a discussion and approval of a proposed plan to highlight IRIS member institution research on the IRIS homepage. A revised draft of an EPO program evaluation dashboard was presented and discussed, along with the posting of evaluation reports on the EPO website (dev.iris.edu/hq/programs/epo/about/evaluation), and a discussion of potential new metrics for the program assuming the NGEO proposal is successful. The next topic was an update on the status of the Mars InSight mission and IRIS’s expanded role in providing data access and resources for the public, following the receipt of a new outreach award from JPL. This was followed by a discussion of potential future directions for an online professional development course that was successfully run in collaboration with University of Alaska Fairbanks and University of Alaska Anchorage. The next discussion focused on current and future seismographs in schools collaborations, building on a recent international meeting held in London that was attended by IRIS EPO staff. This was followed by a discussion of related ongoing and potential citizen science collaborations, including RaspberryShake, MyShake, and DigitSeis.
After a tour of the Nevada Seismological Laboratory, the next section of the meeting focused on UNAVCO Education and Community Engagement activities and opportunities for collaborations and synergies. This was followed by a discussion of EarthScope synthesis projects related to E&O, and how to ensure an EarthScope legacy. Then the committee discussed the closing out of the NSF SAGE award, including a plan for spending any remaining funds.
The 2nd day began with an executive session, which was followed by a review of the budgetary items discussed the previous day. Then there was a discussion of the format of future standing committee meetings, particularly the importance of face-to-face meetings. The meeting concluded with the creation of a list of cross-program issues that the EPOSC desired to be brought to the upcoming CoCom meeting.
