Related papers: AAS Graduate Admissions Task Force: Final report a…
Beginning in 2012, NASA utilized a strategic process to identify broad societal questions, or grand challenges, that are well suited to the aerospace sector and align with national priorities. This effort generated NASA's first grand…
Computational skills are required across all astronomy disciplines. Many students enter degree programs without sufficient skills to solve computational problems in their core classes or contribute immediately to research. We recommend…
The Astronomy Genealogy Project ("AstroGen"), a project of the Historical Astronomy Division of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), will soon appear on the AAS website. Ultimately, it will list the world's astronomers with their…
Given the impressive investment by the nation in observational Astronomy and Astrophysics facilities coming on line now and in the near future, we advocate for an increased investment in applied and fundamental research on Astrophysical and…
We use four years of introductory astronomy scores to analyze the ability of the current population to perform college level work and measure the amount of grade inflation across various majors. Using an objective grading scale, one that is…
Four years after the last LISA meeting, the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) finds itself in the middle of major changes to the infrastructure and contents of its database. In this paper we highlight a number of features of great…
The NASA Astrophysics Data System Abstract Service has become a key component of astronomical research. It provides bibliographic information daily, or near daily, to a majority of astronomical researchers worldwide. We describe the history…
Since its inception in 1993, the ADS Abstract Service has become an indispensable research tool for astronomers and astrophysicists worldwide. In those seven years, much effort has been directed toward improving both the quantity and the…
Undergraduate physics and astronomy students are expected to engage with scientific literature as they begin their research careers, but reading comprehension skills are rarely explicitly taught in major courses. We seek to determine the…
Joining a research group is one of the most important events on a graduate student's path to earning a PhD, but the ways students go about searching for a group remain largely unstudied. It is therefore crucial to investigate whether…
We report the outcomes of a survey that explores the current practices, needs and expectations of the astrophysics community, concerning four research aspects: open science practices, data access and management, data visualization, and data…
A recent paper evaluating a new rubric-based graduate admissions approach using generic methods tentatively suggested that its decisions differed noticeably from the previous approach in an unspecified way. Using prior knowledge that the…
Conference attendance is fundamental for a successful career in astronomy. However, many factors limit such attendance in ways that can disproportionately affect women and minorities more. In this white paper, we present the results of a…
We examined how introductory physics students' attitudes and approaches to problem solving compare to those of introductory astronomy students, using a previously validated survey, the Attitudes and Approaches to Problem Solving (AAPS)…
NASA Astrophysics Division funds development of cutting-edge technology to enable its missions to achieve ambitious and groundbreaking science goals. These technology development efforts are managed by the Physics of the Cosmos, Cosmic…
Laboratory astrophysics and complementary theoretical calculations are the foundations of astronomy and astrophysics and will remain so into the foreseeable future. The impact of laboratory astrophysics ranges from the scientific conception…
During its annual conference in 2024, the French Society of Astronomy \& Astrophysics (SF2A) hosted, for the fourth time, a special session dedicated to discussing the environmental transition within the French astrophysics research…
Women in the Astronomy and STEM fields face systemic inequalities throughout their careers. Raising awareness, supported by detailed statistical data, represents the initial step toward closely monitoring hurdles in career progress and…
This article introduces a set of distance education astronomy laboratory exercises for use by college students and instructors and discuss first usage results. This General Astronomy Education Source (GEAS) exercise set contains eight…
During its annual conference in 2024, the French Society of Astronomy & Astrophysics (SF2A) hosted a special session dedicated to discussing the environmental transition within the scope of our occupation. Since 2021, thinking on this…