This year my favourite conference series, the Cool Stars conference, took place in Tokyo. A sizeable fraction of my research group went to join the conference, and we presented a bunch of talks and posters. One of our exchange PhD students even won the poster prize and as her prize she got a plenary talk on the final day of the conference. Scientifically a really good conference, and culturally something new for me, because I hadn’t been to Japan before. Some photos below the cut.

Talk by group members were:

Silva Järvinen with a splinter session talk on the magnetism of interacting stellar systems in open clusters, plus a short poster flash talk on science with the ELT-ANDES U-band; myself with a plenary talk on the dynamo activity of mature sun-like stars with anomalously fast rotation; Raghavan Gopalan with a splinter session talk on the connection between stellar high-energy spectra and observational signatures of exoplanet evaporation; Demsond Dsouza with a poster-related splinter session talk on using wide binary stars to study the scatter in stellar activity; and Yuehong Chen, one of our exchange students, with her poster prize talk in the plenary session on simulations of stellar energetic particle events associated with coronal mass ejections.

Posters by group members were:

Iva Vilovic’s poster on constraining coronal emission measure distributions from low-resolution X-ray spectra; Ilaria Civale’s poster on the corona of HD 189733; Zheng Sun’s poster on space weather around M dwarfs; Julian Alvarado-Gómez’s poster on stellar magnetism of bright stars in the PLATO field; and the two posters that also had short talks, Silva on science with the U-band of ELT-ANDES and Desmond on wide binaries. We also met lots of old friends from the field, and had time for a group dinner at a fancy restaurant (the Whiskey Library, which offers whiskeys paired to the meals), and a following late-evening gyoza dinner because the fancy restaurant was so fancy that we were still hungry after the dinner 🙂

Some photos –

Group dinner with 6 out of 9 away team members at the Whiskey Library:

and at the gyoza place afterwards:

The various talks:

and the posters: