One of my favourite conferences, the Cool Stars Workshop, took place in Uppsala last week. My PhD student Rachel Booth presented her work in a talk at the splinter session on Stellar Magnetic Activity – her first talk at a conference! And she did great! A lot of interesting stuff is going on at the moment with the spin-down and decrease in magnetic activity of old cool stars, and it seems like there may be different trends of rotation with age, activity with age, and rotation versus activity than we thought before. Exciting times!

Another highlight of the conference was the plenary talk of my friend Cecilia Garraffo, who talked about her latest results on angular momentum loss in combination with magnetic field geometries of cool stars. This can potentially explain why we see such a rapid transition from fast-spinning young stars to more slowly rotating stars at older ages.

And of course, as always at the conference dinner, the big announcement where the next Cool Stars Workshop will be held in two years from now. Quite unsurprisingly, for its 20th anniversary Cool Stars will return to Cambridge, MA, where it all started. My former boss and ongoing collaborator Scott Wolk will be one of the organizers, together with Andrea Dupree. Really looking forward to the next workshop!