It has been a challenging year for the ECR committee. We began the year planning two key events, the Coffee Science Workshop and a Careers Forum to coincide Monthly Seminar and Winter Workshop. Unfortunately, due to strict restrictions employed to combat the spread of COVID-19, these events were cancelled. With about 80% of the ECR community based in Melbourne, the two lock-downs in Melbourne greatly impacted the events that could be organised throughout the year. Other events that were planned for 2020 were also postponed, including “72 hours of science” and the Bender tutorials.

The ECR committee has been working with Iain and Jasmine, communication and outreach officers, to plan a video series. The aim of the series is to raise the profile of Exciton Science within the research community and establish/reinforce the Centre’s expertise in various fields. Participants will have the option of producing videos of their research at different levels of complexity to address different audiences. The videos will range from introductory and general remarks about their research for social media to high technical “how to” videos aimed at other researchers. The Outreach/Communication team have offered assistance to prepare instructional material and with the ECR committee, to help participants with the subject of their films and in identifying obstacles/challenges. A key feature of the series will be coherence with similar formatting styles. Once the video series has been established, it will expand from ECR to everyone else in the Centre. The first videos will be produced in the new year.

A 2 day retreat is currently in preparation for March 2021. The first day will be focused around science and forming inter-nodal collaborations and will include introductions from each of the researchers, group discussion about the key limitations in the various fields of research within the Centre and possible solutions, as well as, tutorials sessions run by members of the ECR on data visualisation, ab-initio calculations, data manipulation and data science. The emphasis of the second day will be career and professional development. There will be an interesting presentation by Associate Professor Inger Mewburn entitled 'So you're finishing your PhD in a pandemic' that will address how career opportunities have been shaped by COVID-19. A collection of other speakers will describe their experiences in moulding their careers post-PhDs and form a panel for a Q&A session. At the retreat, elections for a new ECR committee with be conducted. The ECR committee have redefined the roles and responsibilities of the members and expanded it to 7 positions.

For the remainder of 2021 the overarching theme will be to recover from the impact of COVID-19 by reigniting inter-nodal collaborations and hosting the events that we postponed due to COVID-19 restrictions.