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The AbGradE (Astrobiology Graduates in Europe) symposium is scheduled to be hosted in Edinburgh, Scotland, October 9-10, 2014. The organization committee is comprised of both graduate and postdoctoral researchers across Europe.

The symposium will host about 40-60 participants consisting of graduate students and early career postdocs. The conference will be held in 2014 for the first time, and we plan to have a smaller meeting in the first year to initiate AbGradE.

The proposed conference will consist of two days of scientific sessions and an event dedicated to public outreach and education. To aid the setting up of AbGradE, we plan to have a world-cafe brainstorming event and a round table discussion.

Several invited keynote lecturers will give a basic introduction into the main subfields of Astrobiology, helping new graduate students and post-docs in the field to understand the research of the other participants. This will also be a useful introduction to the sort of topics that will be discussed in the succeeding EANA meeting (13th to 16th of October 2014), which will also be held in Edinburgh.

All participants will then present their work with a talk or a poster, unless they are presenting at the Space Factor contest during the succeeding EANA meeting. This enables early career astrobiologists to expand their horizons by forming collaborations and sharing their work and ideas with their contemporaries, a critical element in such an interdisciplinary field as astrobiology.