From October 7 through October 10 2024, the Roman HLIS PIT held our first in-person team meeting. The meeting was hosted at IPAC in Pasadena, CA. The meeting was also hybrid, so members of the team could join remotely if they were unable to make it in person.

As it was the first in person team meeting, the general feeling throughout the group was excitement towards the collaboration. Early career and new members of the group were integrated with people who have been thinking about the Roman mission since its conception as an idea about 15 years ago. At a Team dinner held on Tuesday night, senior members of the team gave speeches celebrating  the work that has been done so far and expressing enthusiasm for the work that is to come. 

The meeting’s plenary sessions included overview of the PIT responsibilities, introductions to the three Working Groups within the PIT, and a peer-review session where external collaborators were invited to give feedback on the structure, organization, and goals of the PIT. The meeting also included multiple “splinter-sessions” where the group split up into smaller groups based on their interests. These sessions focused primarily on the cosmological parameter inference pipeline, and strategy and priorities for shear and clustering measurements. Most significantly, the team spent lots of time at the meeting discussing a proposal for the Roman survey strategy. Members from different science working groups shared a vast amount of work in service of reaching a consensus on every different aspect of the survey strategy proposal.

On the first and second day of the meeting, early career scientist members of the PIT were invited to give “flash-talks” on their research. These five-minute presentations spanned topics from detector systematics to effects of baryonic feedback on the matter power spectrum to different photometric redshift measurement softwares. Eighteen total early-career researchers presented, including undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and new faculty. These talks were a significant highlight, emphasizing the high priority given to inclusion of early career scientists on the PIT. 

Thanks to the LOC and SOC committees: Brendan Crill (Chair), Olivier Doré, Dida Markovic, Dan Masters, Diogo Souza, Eric Huff, Marissa Rosales, Jonathan Blazek, Chihway Chang, Eric Huff, Eric Jullo, Tim Eifler, and Robyn Sanderson for planning a successful meeting!