With the upcoming deadline (31 May) for the next round of ESO Studentship applications, I would like to briefly outline my recent experience with this award over the last year. The ESO Studentship is designed to augment one or two years of your existing PhD candidature, facilitated at either the Garching offices or Chilean headquarters.

While I was a researcher at the Australian National University's Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics a couple of years ago, I was able to apply for ESO time with the FLAMES+UVES instrument to get spectra for stars in globular clusters for which I already had HST data. Here I summarise our findings, as recently published in the Astrophysical Journal.

The 2nd ESO-Australia joint conference (ESOz-2020) from 17-21 Feb 2020 in Perth brought together 120 researchers across the world (with 57% Australia-based and 43% based abroad) to discuss the build up of baryons across multiple tracers and facilities, and start a conversation about coordination of surveys from multiple facilities in order to move towards a truly panchromatic view of baryons in the Universe.

The access to ESO facilities is opening up great opportunities of carrying out new exciting research for the astronomy community in Australia. In particular, I have used this opportunity to study local galactic winds.

Under the arrangements for our strategic partnership with the European Southern Observatory, Australia has two observers on the ESO Council: I'm one and Jane Urquhart from the Department of Industry is the other. The Council is ESO’s ruling body and has two representatives from each Member State, usually one government representative and one astronomer. Since ESO now has 16 Member States (plus one strategic partner), that means ESO Council meetings require a big room and a big table!

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to be one of just 7 students selected from a field of almost 350 applicants worldwide to be part of the first cohort of ESO Summer Research Students. This new program provides the opportunity for students who have yet to commence a PhD to spend 6 weeks in the European summer working alongside ESO astronomers on a research project at their headquarters in Garching, Germany.

ESO’s VLT in 2030 workshop in June provided a unique opportunity for the broad ESO community to prevent their vision for the world’s most productive observatory in a broad scientific context. Big picture context talks ranged from the solar system (Heike Rauer) through to Cosmology (Matthew Colless), with arguably the most relevance, interest and excitement in the areas of exoplanet formation, resolving stellar populations in galaxies including the Milky Way, and extragalactic astrophysics including AGN feedback.

Dear fellow Australian astronomers, 
 
This is a hopefully thorough update from your ESO Users Committee (UC) representative. My role is to represent Australian ESO Users and act as a capillary link between ESO and the Australian community.

It was my pleasure to start as the new director of the AAO node at Macquarie University on April 29th after being non-resident in Australia for more than 30 years.  Following a PhD at the University of Melbourne, I began my working career at the Joint Astromomy Centre (JAC) in Hilo, Hawaii, then the old Royal Observatory in Edinburgh which later became the UKATC and latterly, a long stint of 14 years at ESO headquarters in Munich where I was variously head of instrumentation and later technology development.