Invitation to participate in VLBI in the GLAST Era

[Matthias Kadler <mkadler@milkyway.gsfc.nasa.gov>]

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 invited 
participants, so if you are able to come, please register as soon as 
possible by replying to this email.  Note that we have to make 
arrangements for all participants to be allowed to enter Goddard, 
therefore we need your answer by Friday, March 2, 2007.

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 want to encourage you to suggest students or young postdocs from your 
institute -who represent the future of Gamma-Ray and VLBI AGN research- 
to participate in the workshop. We will accept up to one or two young 
researchers from each institute and a good fraction of the available 
time and poster space will be reserved for contributed presentations 
from this group. We plan to have a bulletin board at the workshop where 
participants can advertise career opportunities for young researchers at 
their institute, particularly opportunities for students from the "other 
end of the spectrum".

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. We will reserve a block of rooms in a 
nearby hotel in Greenbelt. More detailed information on these issues 
will follow shortly.


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