Conference: Summer Program in Astrophysics 2025: Cool Frontiers: Exploring Dust and Ice in the Cosmos

The University of Virginia will organize and host the 2025 Summer Program in Astrophysics (SPA), from June 23 to August 1, 2025. The topic of the 2025 program will be “Cool Frontiers: Exploring Dust and Ice in the Cosmos.” The SPA is a unique graduate and postdoctoral training program which brings together world-class scientists with a wide breadth of technical skills and research interests, together with about fifteen graduate students to solve topical outstanding problems in astrophysics.

The SPA operates in the summer for six weeks and has been hosted by various institutions world-wide over the past fourteen years.

The program begins with a one-week workshop on a featured topic with morning introductory lectures by invited faculty and afternoon contributed presentations on state-of-the-art research by our long-term participants. The remaining five weeks are devoted to student research, supplemented by daily seminars and discussions. Astrophysical dust and ice play a critical role in the formation and evolution of planets, stars, and galaxies.

Many questions about their properties, origin, and evolution remain. With access to forefront observational data, e.g., ALMA and JWST, which are providing unprecedented spatially and spectrally resolved views of dust and ice in different contexts, as well as theoretical models on all scales incorporating self-consistent, detailed treatments of the important physical and chemical processes, participants will work on projects that not only address fundamental and long-standing questions about dust and ice, but also ultimately have the potential to advance our understanding of stellar and planetary astrophysics, galaxy evolution and cosmology.

By design, the SPA trains a large number of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, providing them with close mentoring by leading scientists in the field. The students acquire research skills during the program, while the postdocs gain mentoring and leadership skills. The program is mindful of diversity, and has an excellent track record for training female scientists in particular.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.