Other Request for Funding: The Pan-African School for Emerging Astronomers 2024 in Tunisia

[aaryapatil]

Full name

Aarya Patil (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy)

Description

This funding request is for a five day Python/Astropy workshop in Monastir, Tunisia from 2 - 6 September, 2024. This workshop will focus on providing students with programming and data science skills (utilising Jupyter notebooks developed in house and material from existing AstroPy Learn tutorials). In PASEA 2022, we ran such a workshop for the first time over a three-day period. Following successful implementation of this workshop and feedback from students, we have decided to extend it to a full week to cover programming/Python basics, Astropy concepts, and a short research project with LCO light curve data.

Project / Work

The Pan-African School for Emerging Astronomers (PASEA) is an experiential short course in astronomy for African university students, designed and taught by a team of astronomers and science educators from Africa and around the world. PASEA aims to build a critical mass of astronomers in Africa and exchange ideas about teaching across continents. Founded in 2013 by astronomers based at the University of Toronto and the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, this school has graduated over 240 students from West African countries, many of which are now graduate students and postdoctoral fellows worldwide. After four successful schools in West Africa, PASEA is opened its doors to students from the entire continent and transformed into a truly pan-African school. PASEA 2022 took place in Livingstone, Zambia, in East Africa, in October and included approximately 40 students from 13 different African nations. PASEA 2024 will be held in Monastir, Tunisia, thereby expanding its reach to northern Africa.

PASEA is a two-week in-person program. The first week focuses on curriculum development and professional development for instructors. The second week is the summer school, with two parallel streams for undergraduate and postgraduate students. The AstroPy workshop proposed here is intended to run as a core element of the postgraduate stream curriculum. For more information about our program, please check out our Nature Astronomy 2021 publication.

Total request

633 USD (575 euros)

Itemized budget

The budget below are to cover my visa and flight costs to Monastir, Tunisia since I will be leading and teaching the post-graduate stream of PASEA 2024. The budget is in EUR and USD (with the current conversion rate). The rest of my instructor travel costs will be covered by other sources of funding.

item	EUR	USD
visa	75	83
flight	500	550
total	575	633

Note that this request was made after considering all different sources of available funding. This led to a delay in the submission of this travel request. Please let me know if you have any concerns.

Advance needed

No response

[kelle]

The finance committee (without Aarya) approved this request.

[kelle]

@aaryapatil , please submit your reimbursement request to Open Collective.

[kelle]

NASA: https://opencollective.com/astropy/projects/astropy-nasa/expenses/new

[aaryapatil]

Unfortunately, I did not receive my visa on time and was not able to go to Tunisia. I instead helped with the school virtually. Is it possible to get reimbursed for the visa fees?