APECS Austria is founded

A.A.S. members Sigrid Schiesser, Elisabeth Öfner, Elena Nuykina and Gerti Eilmsteiner-Saxinger are already members of APECS international.

Dear Polar Early Career Scientists!

In the framework of the last Austrian Polar Research Institute (APRI) annual meeting, an APECS Austria initiative was born. If you don’t know, APECS stands for Association of Polar Early Career scientists. It was started during the last International Polar Year and is since the beginning a very active, internationally well regarded union. On the homepage (www.apecs.is) you can find more about APECS activities.
Through the years, a bunch of APECS national committees (NCs) formed, to bring together all the young polar scientists of different fields of one country. Every NC has to define its individual foci (e.g., outreach or the organization of workshops), depending on the needs and wishes of its members. APECS Austria will be closely related to APRI.

The first step for APECS Austria is to recruit a large enough group of motivated people who are interested. Currently, we are a small group of active members that are starting up all this. However, we want to emphasize that there are various ways of being engaged as a member: There is the opportunity to be actively involved at an organizational level. But a general interest, such as participation in workshops and other activities, is also more than welcome!

The APECS membership, hence the APECS Austria membership is for free!
We invite all undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, early faculty members, educators and others with interests in Polar Regions and the wider cryosphere to become members of our National Committee! We also encourage already established scientists to join APECS as mentors.
At the end, to help us form an APECS Austria that is adapted to the interests of you as members we ask you to have a look at our online survey – just takes a few seconds. Go to survey link
APECS Austria will be a nice way to get to know all the polar related scientists of all the different fields, from natural to social sciences, of Austria, but also from all over the planet. Would be nice if we get the thing going!

Best regards,
The APECS Austria founding team

Daniel Binder daniel.binder@zamg.ac.at
Elin Högström Elin.Hoegstroem@geo.tuwien.ac.at
Sigrid Schiesser sigrid.schiesser@univie.ac.at
Birgit Wild birgit.wild@univie.ac.at
Mounir Takriti mounir.takriti@gmx.net
Barbara Widhalm barbarawidhalm@tuwien.ac.at