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INA NEWS UPDATE FROM INA 17, SANTOS, BRAZIL Summer 2019 From the INA Committee


THE CONFERENCE

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Overview

This was our first conference in the Southern Hemisphere and a significant distance from the traditional centres of INA activity. Nonetheless around 70 delegates from around the world and were welcomed by a Brazilian group of around 25 scientists. There was a pre-conference excursion to coastal wetlands of Cananaia and a post-conference excursion to the more rugged coastal area of Ubatuba, famous for its bird-life. In between there were four days of conference in Santos, based in the rather nice Sheraton Hotel. The programme included four keynotes talks about 40 other oral presentations and 50 posters. We started with a very lively ice-breaker in a beach-front bar, ended by being serenaded by a Samba band, and had a very memorable conference dinner and dance somewhere in the middle. For most of us it was both an excellent conference and a fine introduction to Brazil - and we are very grateful to Karen Costa, Felipe Toledo and their team.
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Student Awards

An INA tradition is to have student presentation awards. The oral presentations were judged by a committee, while for the posters we followed the precedent set in recent meetings and allowed everyone to vote. The committee had a difficult job since nearly half the presentations were given by students and most of them were of a very high standard. After much deliberation, however, they were pleased to award the prize to Alba Gonzales-Lanchas of Salamanca University for an excellent talk on Gephyrocapsa in MIS-11. For the posters the public vote reached a clear decision with an exceptionally fine poster by Kazuki Hoshina (Yamagata) dealing with Tibetan nannofossils winning by a clear margin.

PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

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INA18 - Provence - 2021

The conference was very pleased to accept an offer from Luc Beaufort to host the next conference in Provence, at the Aix Marseille University. There was no need for a vote on this since although several people had discussed hosting the next conference in the end this was only formal proposal for 2021. It is an ideal offer since Luc leads an outstanding research team at CEREGE - including Claire Bolton and Baptiste Sucheras-Marx. CEREGE (Centre Européen de Recherche et d'Enseignement des Géosciences de l'Environnement) is a research insitute of the Unverisity outside Aix, but the conference will be held on one of the main university sites in either Aix or Marseilles, either of which would be fine locations.
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Pleistocene Nannofossil workshop, Pavia, February 2021

A group of specialists in Quaternary nannofossils - Claudia Lupi (U. Pavia), Miriam Cobianchi (Pavia), Maria Marino (U. Bari), and Patrizia Maiorano (U. Bari) had proposed to Giuliana Villa that they should organise a workshop on Pleistocene Calcareous Nannofossils in Pavia (near Milan, Italy) in early 2021. It was agreed by council that this was a timely initiative and that INA would support it, including providing some financial suport. More details will be provided as they become available.
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INA Summer School 2020

Since the last INA meeting two summer schools have been held, a new initiative designed to provide high-level training for new nannofossil workers. The summer schools were hosted in Lyon in France by Emanuela Mattioli and her team in co-ordination with Giuliana Villa and assisted by Matt Hampton and Jeremy Young. The first summer school in 2018 focussed on the Cenozoic and the second, earlier this year, on the Mesozoic. Both were very succesful, with ca 20 students being taught each time, by international groups of leading experts.
For the future it is planned to have summer schools every other year, alternating with INA confrences. So the next summer school will be next year, and will again focus on the Cenozoic.
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THANKS - reference slide sets

A new initiative was proposed at the meeting - to establish a reference collection of nannofossil samples, to be held centrally and a set of slides made from them to be held at multiple locations internationally. The proposal, which was agreed, is for the central collection to be held at University of Parma were Davide Persico, in association with Giuliana Villa, will create sample sets. A committee to co-ordinate this was appointed consisting of Jorijntje Henderiks (U. Uppsala), Denise Kulhanek (IODP, College Station Texas), and Alyssa Peleo-Alampay (National Inst. of Geosciences, Manila, the Philippines). Soon there will be an open call to become a host within the THANKS network, advertised on INA’s coccoliths mailing list and the INA website. It is also planned that high quality images will be taken from these slides sets and shared via Nannotax (with modified search to allow sets of images from a single sample to be displayed).

CHANGES IN INA COUNCIL

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Council Members at large - Ines Galovic and Shijun Jiang

INA Council members at large are appointed for four years, in order to broaden diversity on the INA council, to ensure it is not exclusively run by a small group of activists and to assist in promoting the Association. Kyoko Hagino and Emma Sheldon came the the end of their terms at this meeting. To replace them a committee was set up to canvass for and reccommend possible candidates and they recommended Ines Galovic (Croatian Geological Survey) and Shijun Jiang (Guangzhou University), these recommendations were endorsed by the INA meeting, so we are pleased to welcome Ines and Shijun onto the council.
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JNR Editor - Laurel Bybell

Laurel Bybell was confirmed as new editor of the Journal of Nannoplankton Research. Laurel is a very experienced nannofossil expert, from the USGS, she helped host the INA Conference in Reston and has edited the conference abstract volumes for the last 4 conferences. She will be assisted in producing the journal by a committee including Rich Howe (arranging reviews), Jackie Lees (copy editing) and Jeremy Young (web-publication).
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Social Media Officer - Odysseas Archontikis

Jarett Cruz (FSU Tallahassee and BugWare) has been Social Media Officer since the inception of the post in 2013 and has in particular set-up the INA Facebook page and been responsible for most of the hundreds of posts and images on it. He is now passing the responsibility on to Odysseas Archontikis (from Athen University, now starting a PhD in Oxford), who has already started posting content.
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Associate Public Outreach Officer - Diego Felipe Vallejo

Diego has started plotting a video on calcareous nannofossils and their applications and showed us a trailer/teaser for it he has prepared with colleagues in Colombia. It was agreed this was something INA would like to support and since this intersects with Mario Cachao's role as Public Outreach Officer he was appointed as an associate.
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Membership Secretary - Karl-Heinz Baumann

Sadly our previous membership secretary Sebastain Meieir has left the world of research and with his new commitments as a teacher was unable to carry on his much appreciated work as membership secretary. However, Karl-Heinz (Kalle) Baumann has taken on the role - as ratified at the meeting.