Since 1990, the Mid-Year Meeting (MYM) has become a regular feature of the Indian Academy of Sciences. These meetings were started to provide the elected Fellows and Associates of the Academy an opportunity and a platform to meet and share their work.
Every year the Mid-Year Meeting is held in the Faculty Hall of the Indian Institute of Science. Only on two occasions the meetings travelled to the Royal Cities of Mysore and Hyderabad –during the Diamond and Platinum Jubilee years of the Academy.
One of the major attractions of these meetings is the special and public lectures. The special lectures mark the beginning of the day, and the day ends with a public lecture, usually delivered by an eminent researcher or a scholar. In the past, Ramachandra Guha, a well-known historian-writer, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Founder of Biocon, and several others from different walks of life have delivered these talks. The public lecture on the evening of 1st July will be by Pratap Bhanu Mehta from the Centre of Policy Research, New Delhi. He will talk on the “Two Ideas of India”—India as a Federation of Communities and India as a Zone of Freedom, and how the emphasis must shift from the former to the latter.
Given that this year has been proclaimed as the International Year of Pulses, this edition of the Academy meeting has arranged a special lecture on a possible second Green Revolution through pulses.
The other special lecture is a talk on India’s ASTROSTAT mission – the instruments on board and the scientific results obtained so far.
More recently, timely topical symposiums have been added to add a diverse flavour to the gathering. For instance, a mini-symposium on the ‘Science of Himalaya’ was organized in one of the previous editions of this meeting. This year the meeting will host a symposium on the recent discovery of gravitational waves. Scientists involved directly with the discovery of the gravity waves earlier this year will speak about the challenges faced when trying to observe these waves. The history of gravity waves from prediction to discovery, as well as the future prospects of these waves and the implications for setting up observatories in India, will be discussed.
This edition of MYM is definitely bigger and more exciting. Join us on 1-2 July, 2016, at the Indian Institute of Science!
For a detailed programme card, click here: http://www.ias.ac.in/public/Resources/Events/27_MYM_Programme.pdf
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