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astronomical facilities available to them in India, and the astronomy-related mega-science projects that India is a part of. In particular, the programme also featured a number of lectures related to the science of gravitational waves and the upcoming LIGO - India facility. The question and answer sessions were handled through Zoomas well as viaYouTube. The participation of the attendants in these activities during the lectures was crucial to the success of the programme, which was advertised to more than 600 participants, who had applied to the Summer School and Refresher Course from different parts of India. The videos of most of the lectures have been made available online for later viewing. To date, these lectures have garnered about 40,000 views. The entire staff at IUCAA was helpful in the organization of the programme. Santosh Khadilkar took care of the administrative requirements. Divya Rana, a PhD researcher at IUCAA, played an essential role in streaming the programme online. The Zoom video conferencing technicalities were handled by Santosh Jagade, and Sagar Bhosale from the computer centre. Dhruba Saikia along with the Astronomy Centre for Educators at IUCAA, handled the online questions and answers during the lectures as well as the evaluation of the refresher course participants. Surhud More, Aseem Paranjape, and Nishant Singh were the faculty coordinators. The set of l e c t u r e s c a n b e f o u n d o n l i n e a t https://tinyurl.com/issa2020-playlist. Farewell to ... Aishwanya Sharma left IUCAA for personal reasons. Welcome to ... Kanaka Raju Pandiri has joined IUCAA as a post-doctoral fellow under LIGO - India project inApril 2020. He has obtained his PhD from the University of Electro- Communications, Japan, in 2011. He wo r ked a s pos t - doc t o r a l researcher at Extreme Photonics Laboratory, RIKEN Center for Advanced Photonics, Japan, during 2011 - 2014. Subsequently, he worked as a post-doctoral fellow at James R. Macdonald Laboratory, Kansas State University, USA, during 2014 - 2019. His primary interest lies in developing new optical/laser technology, and utilizing it to understand dynamical processes happening in nature. During his previous post-doctoral positions, he has worked on ultrafast laser technology, and employed it to study dynamics of atomic and molecular processes happening at extremely short time scales (femtosecond). At IUCAA, he is working on training, research and development of optical and opto-mechanical systems that will improve the sensitivity of interferometric gravitational wave detectors. No. 123 - July 2020 2