MIST

Magnetosphere, Ionosphere and Solar-Terrestrial

Latest news

Winners of Rishbeth Prizes 2023

We are pleased to announce that following Spring MIST 2023 the Rishbeth Prizes this year are awarded to Sophie Maguire (University of Birmingham) and Rachel Black (University of Exeter).

Sophie wins the prize for the best MIST student talk which was entitled “Large-scale plasma structures and scintillation in the high-latitude ionosphere”. Rachel wins the best MIST poster prize, for a poster entitled “Investigating different methods of chorus wave identification within the radiation belts”. Congratulations to both Sophie and Rachel!

As prize winners, Sophie and Rachel will be invited to write articles for Astronomy & Geophysics, which we look forward to reading.

MIST Council extends their thanks to the University of Birmingham for hosting the Spring MIST meeting 2023, and to the Royal Astronomical Society for their generous and continued support of the Rishbeth Prizes.

Nominations for MIST Council

We are pleased to open nominations for MIST Council. There are two positions available (detailed below), and elected candidates would join Beatriz Sanchez-Cano, Jasmine Kaur Sandhu, Andy Smith, Maria-Theresia Walach, and Emma Woodfield on Council. The nomination deadline is Friday 26 May.

Council positions open for nomination

  • MIST Councillor - a three year term (2023 - 2026). Everyone is eligible.
  • MIST Student Representative - a one year term (2023 - 2024). Only PhD students are eligible. See below for further details.

About being on MIST Council


If you would like to find out more about being on Council and what it can involve, please feel free to email any of us (email contacts below) with any of your informal enquiries! You can also find out more about MIST activities at mist.ac.uk.

Rosie Hodnett (current MIST Student Representative) has summarised their experience on MIST Council below:
"I have really enjoyed being the PhD representative on the MIST council and would like to encourage other PhD students to nominate themselves for the position. Some of the activities that I have been involved in include leading the organisation of Autumn MIST, leading the online seminar series and I have had the opportunity to chair sessions at conferences. These are examples of what you could expect to take part in whilst being on MIST council, but the council will welcome any other ideas you have. If anyone has any questions, please email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..”

How to nominate

If you would like to stand for election or you are nominating someone else (with their agreement!) please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by Friday 26 May. If there is a surplus of nominations for a role, then an online vote will be carried out with the community. Please include the following details in the nomination:
  • Name
  • Position (Councillor/Student Rep.)
  • Nomination Statement (150 words max including a bit about the nominee and your reasons for nominating. This will be circulated to the community in the event of a vote.)
 
MIST Council contact details

Rosie Hodnett - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Mathew Owens - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Beatriz Sanchez-Cano - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Jasmine Kaur Sandhu - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Andy Smith - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Maria-Theresia Walach - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Emma Woodfield - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
MIST Council email - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

RAS Awards

The Royal Astronomical Society announced their award recipients last week, and MIST Council would like to congratulate all that received an award. In particular, we would like to highlight the following members of the MIST Community, whose work has been recognised:
  • Professor Nick Achilleos (University College London) - Chapman Medal
  • Dr Oliver Allanson (University of Birmingham) - Fowler Award
  • Dr Ravindra Desai (University of Warwick) - Winton Award & RAS Higher Education Award
  • Professor Marina Galand (Imperial College London) - James Dungey Lecture

New MIST Council 2021-

There have been some recent ingoings and outgoings at MIST Council - please see below our current composition!:

  • Oliver Allanson, Exeter (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2024 -- Chair
  • Beatriz Sánchez-Cano, Leicester (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2024
  • Mathew Owens, Reading (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2023
  • Jasmine Sandhu, Northumbria (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2023 -- Vice-Chair
  • Maria-Theresia Walach, Lancaster (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2022
  • Sarah Badman, Lancaster (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2022
    (co-opted in 2021 in lieu of outgoing councillor Greg Hunt)

Charter amendment and MIST Council elections open

Nominations for MIST Council open today and run through to 8 August 2021! Please feel free to put yourself forward for election – the voting will open shortly after the deadline and run through to the end of August. The positions available are:

  • 2 members of MIST Council
  • 1 student representative (pending the amendment below passing)

Please email nominations to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by 8 August 2021. Thank you!

Charter amendment

We also move to amend the following articles of the MIST Charter as demonstrated below. Bold type indicates additions and struck text indicates deletions. Please respond to the email on the MIST mailing list before 8 August 2021 if you would like to object to the amendment; MIST Charter provides that it will pass if less than 10% of the mailing list opposes its passing. 

4.1  MIST council is the collective term for the officers of MIST and consists of six individuals and one student representative from the MIST community.

5.1 Members of MIST council serve terms of three years, except for the student representative who serves a term of one year.

5.2 Elections will be announced at the Spring MIST meeting and voting must begin within two months of the Spring MIST meeting. Two slots on MIST council will be open in a given normal election year, alongside the student representative.

5.10 Candidates for student representative must not have submitted their PhD thesis at the time that nominations close.

EGU2020: Sharing Geoscience Online

By Sadie Robertson

What is EGU?

The European Geosciences Union (EGU) is Europe’s leading geoscience research organisation and each year hosts the largest geoscience conference in Europe. This year, EGU2020 was set to be held in Vienna in the first week of May. Abstracts had already been submitted and presentations/posters allocated before the COVID-19 pandemic was declared. After some initial uncertainty, the meeting was scheduled to be hosted online and rebranded as EGU2020: Sharing Geoscience Online.

Preparing for an online conference

As a second year PhD student, EGU was going to be my first large international conference, and I had been scheduled to give a talk. I have previously given talks at NAM (the UK’s National Astronomy Meeting) and at a smaller Magnetospheric Multiscale mission (MMS) Community Meeting.

After being informed that the conference and all talks/posters were online, I assumed that I would still be giving a similar presentation and talk, only over the internet – but I was wrong! A couple of weeks before the conference, I was pointed towards some extra information provided on the conference website; presenters had to upload materials (such as a pdf) prior to their session and then there would be a live online text-based chat during the session. There would be no video/audio element to ensure the conference was as inclusive as possible. As my slides would no longer be comprehensive without me talking alongside, I had to rework them to include more information and clearly portray my results. This culminated in a set of presentation slides/poster hybrid that I uploaded as a pdf, which seemed to be the way most people chose to present their work. I found the best presentations to be the ones with sufficient background detail so that I could understand the problem being investigated.

There was also an issue of copyright, which I had not needed to consider in the same way before. The presentation materials were uploaded and remained accessible by anyone for a month after the conference. EGU provided a creative commons logo to put on slides to make their copyright clear. To avoid issues with reproducing other people’s figures, I had to cut out some diagrams I would usually include and reference on my introductory slides – although it is fine to reproduce figures if you get permission.

The conference

My session, titled ‘Magnetic reconnection and associated multi-scale coupling in space, astrophysics and laboratorial plasmas’, was scheduled for the first day of the conference. I presented work on electron trapping associated with magnetic mirror structures and magnetopause flux ropes, which I have been investigating using MMS. After a few teething issues with the text-based chat, my session convenors decided to allow each presenter to introduce their work and then take questions for 10-15 mins before moving onto the next presenter. Some presenters were not online, so it was hard to predict what time a given presentation would be discussed. When it came to my turn, I had a few simultaneous questions about my work, resulting in some rapid typing to respond to them. Overall, I think I managed to give sufficient answers to the questions and people seemed interested in my work – although it is much harder to judge than when you are talking face-to-face!

I dropped into some other sessions throughout the conference week. The convenors of each session used slightly different formats, meaning each session was slightly different. I sometimes found the sessions hard to follow when viewing the materials being presented for the first time. Jumping between tabs, reading both the chat and presentations at the same time, could become overwhelming. I think the best results and discussion would come from reading the presentation materials in advance, particularly in the presentations most interesting to you. 

The conference was an excellent opportunity to share my work with a large audience and to learn more about a vast range of research. Having not yet attended a large international conference it is difficult to directly compare experiences; however, I did find the social aspects more limited than at in-person conferences. There were very few opportunities to engage in casual conversations, for example in lunch and coffee breaks, which could lead to interesting science discussions. Instead, I felt as though I had to have a specific question to engage in a conversation about someone’s work. Issues such as this may be amplified for students who are new to their fields.

Despite this, adapting to the pandemic has provided us with the opportunity to explore the potential benefits of virtual conferences. Flying is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions in academia. Over the past year, I have worked as part of a team alongside Imperial’s Grantham Institute assessing aviation emissions at Imperial. We found that in the 2017/18 academic year 9% of Imperial’s emissions could be attributed to aviation, comparable to those associated with electricity and gas consumption [1]. Virtual conferences could be used to compliment in-person conferences as a way to cut these greenhouse gas emissions.

Virtual conference advice

If you’re preparing for an online conference, some of my tips would be:

  • Read all email correspondence and online guidance carefully. Don’t assume you know what is expected of you as it can be very different to a regular conference.
  • Give yourself more time than normal to prepare presentation materials. You might need to use a different structure with more information than you usually would, and they could be more visible and remain online after the conference.
  • Don’t forget about technicalities, such as copyright, and get any permissions you may need in advance.
  • Do some reading of uploaded presentations in advance of the scheduled session – particularly if you plan to ask questions.

However, this advice may turn out to be EGU-specific and who knows what structure future online conferences may take!

If you have any more questions about Sadie’s experience at EGU2020: Sharing Geoscience Online, then you can This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..