The conference schedule can be found here ! 

The 2010 Astrobiology Graduate Student Conference (AbGradCon) in Europe will take place in Tällberg, Sweden from June 14-18, 2010. Participants will arive on Sunday 13th and the conference wil start at Monday, June 14th (morning) and run until Friday, June 18th (after lunch).  Half day sessions are planned covering the following topics:

• Astronomy and life
• Evolution and detection of habitable planets
• Weird life: Extremophiles and ancestral life on Earth
• Interaction of geochemistry ofr life and geological signatures of life
• Ad Astra: Miscellaneous topics

One day of the meeting is devoted to workshops with the following themes:

• Fundamental questions of Astrobiology
• Habitability
• Future missions to rocky planets
• Weird forms of life
• Influence of the geochemical context on the origin of life and on the earliest stages of natural and chemical selection
• Detection of exoplanets and habitable worlds
• Missions to outer planets an their satellites
• Deep subsurface life
• Catastrophical events
• What can the geological record on Earth contribute to our search for extinct life elsewhere

The major goal of this meeting is to provide a forum for early-career astrobiologists from allo over the world  to establish international collaborative networks. For a prelimiary schedule as well as the themes for the workshops, scientific sessions and the layout of the excursion, please check the relevant subsites under the "Program" heading. To obtain infos for speakers and poster presenters, please go to the sub-links under "Practical information". 

Five half-day scientific sessions will be held with one invited keynote speaker per session to give a broad introduction to the subject. Each session will futher include eight contributed talks by students/early career scientists. Time for discussion is allocated after every talk. For themes of the different sessions please check the "Sessions" submenu under the "Program" heading.  

To allow in-depth discussions of important themes and to enable participants to initiate fruitful collaborations, Thursday 17th June 2010 will be devoted to ten discussion-based workshops, five of which will run in parallel during the morning and five during the afternoon. Each workshop will start with an introduction into the subject. For themes of the different workshops  please check the "Workshops" submenu under the "Program" heading.  

The conference program includes a one day excursion (wedensay June 17th) to geologically interesting localities in the Siljan impact crater area. One aim of the excursion is to get an idea of the extent to which such catastrophic events can influence the evolution of life by triggering mass extinctions. At the excursion, people will gain some hands-on (or hammer-on) experience of how to decipher the geological past. For further information please check the "Excursion" submenu under the "Program" heading. 

For a preliminary schedule in .doc form please go to the "Schedule" subpage under the Program menue bar. 

Keynote speakers

The following people have agreed to function as keynote speakers for AbGradCon2010:

John Baross, University of Washington, USA

Lisa Kaltenegger, Harvard University, USA

Tilman Spohn, German Aerospace Centre, Germany

Frances Westall, Centre de Biophysique Móleculaire, France