The annual PFS collaboration meeting was held from 9 to 13 December 2019 at California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Here is a brief report by a young researcher who participated in the meeting.
The collaboration meeting is a good opportunity for us to exchange scientific ideas. It is important to learn the status of instrumentation and scientific goals/objectives from other working groups to understand our current conditions of the survey. We have joint session where everyone from different working groups join and break out sessions where people in each working group get together.
One thing which is personally memorable is the words from Prof. Jim Gunn at the banquet. Since he received a prestigious Kyoto prize from Inamori foundation this fall (see our previous post and official website), he gave small speech. He described that the PFS collaboration is surprisingly friendly collaboration despite the many difficulties that the instrumentation team is currently confronting, and I hope that this culture we have in the PFS collaboration continues even after the survey starts taking data. The culture of astronomical researches changed after the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in such a way that many people collaborate for projects more often and the value of research is more based on ideas rather than the data themselves, and hopefully the PFS collaboration keeps this culture as well.
The Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics 
A snapshot of the meeting
