35th Annual Report (2022-2023) - ENGLISH

17 R. SRIANAND Director Officiating, IUCAA schools. At present ACE is focused on school and college education. With an appropriate planning, we hope to use the facilities established at ACE to offer a wide range of advanced A&A courses that students from different universities can credit through academic credit banks under the National Education Policy 2022 (NEP2022). As a part of LIGO-India activities IUCAA is involved in different Education and Public Outreach (EPO) programmes. One of the main activities is the creation of content, coordination and posting of LIGO-India social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube). LIGO-EPO members regularly engage with local administration regarding LIGO project and coordinate various activities with the general public, school and college students in different villages around Hingoli. These activities are extremely important to educate the local public so that all developments over time in this area happens without increasing the seismic noise level. Post Covid19, following our tradition this year we have opened our campus to the general public during the National Science Day (NSD). About 10,000 people visited IUCAA on the Open Day. As part of the NSD, IUCAA has conducted science themed competitions in Pune District rural schools (on 11 February 2023) and for Pune City schools (on 25 February 2023). Students from 70 schools have participated in these competitions (like essay writing, drawing, model making and quiz). We have arranged exciting talks, engaging posters, demonstrations, video shows and live solar viewing on 28 February 2023. The unique themes for this year are (i) Studying the Sun with Aditya-L1, (ii) Inspiring the future women of science, (iii) Astro-Mythbusters and (iv) know our shared sky – live skywatch. In the afternoon of the science day Prof. Narlikar, Prof. Ajit Kembhavi, Prof. Surhud More and myself answered the questions from the general public through our programme “Ask the Scientist”. I would like to express my sincere thanks to regular and contractual staff of IUCAA to make this annual activity a grand success. I would like to thank IUCAA members and my seniors for their help in performingmy duty as the officiating director of IUCAA. I would also like to express thanks to our mentors, our Governing Board with Dr K. Kasturirangan as Chair, and our Council, chaired by Dr M. Jagadesh Kumar. I also acknowledge the help, advice and support from the University Grants Commission and its officers and staff, and from the Ministry of Education of the Government of India. to make proposals for new observations. ASSC has conducted several workshops / data analysis schools in the past year. The main highlight is that since January 2022 there are 80 refereed publications using ASTROSAT data, 26 of them were co- authored by IUCAA members, making IUCAA the leading contributor to the science emanating from ASTROSAT. IUCAA is playing active role in generating the list of GRBs detected using CZTI and maintaining the light-curves and derived parameters of the detected GRBs in an user friendly manner. I am happy to note that recently the number of GRBs identified with CZTI has reached 500. The experience gained in running the POC for CZTI will come in handy when we set up POC for SUIT. Astronomy Centre for Educators (ACE) of IUCAA includes Teaching Learning Centre (TLC), National Resource Centres (NRC) and International Astronomical Union's office of education (IAU-OAE). The main activities performed during this year include (i) conducting an online seminar on education where India's leading educationalists have participated and discussed about various innovating teaching methods to efficiently communicate higher education to students and general public; (ii) conducted a Astronomy, Science & Society Workshop 2022-2023 for faculty members from different discipline in collaboration with Maharashtra state faculty development authority. (iii) Conducted a antenna design competition to detect radio signal from Jupiter (in collaboration with Fergusson College Pune ) . The r e we r e 20 co l l eges participating in this activity and three best designs were selected as the best designs and were given prizes. (iv) the centre also regularly conducts Refresher courses and Radio astronomy winter