The Offices for Science are very pleased to present the 2024 ESO Fellows. Here is an introduction to the Fellows due to start in Garching and Chile later this year.

The ESO research studentship programme provides an outstanding opportunity for PhD students to experience the exciting scientific environment at one of the world's leading observatories. ESO's studentship positions are open to students enrolled in a university PhD programme in astronomy or related fields. Students accepted into the programme work on their doctoral project under the formal supervision of their home university supervisor, but they come to ESO to work and study under the co-supervision of an ESO staff astronomer for a period of between six months (Chile) / one year (Germany) and two years.

In its efforts to promote the scientific exchange among astronomers, the Directorate for Science at ESO continues to provide support and funding for the organisation of scientific workshops in Santiago and in Garching as well as co-funding for some external workshops. Science workshops are an essential component of ESO's programmes and represent a unique opportunity to promote and foster ideas and collaborations within the scientific community.

Congratulations to ESO Fellow Julia V. Seidel on being awarded the prestigious 2024 MERAC Prize for the Best Doctoral Thesis in Observational Astrophysics! A well-deserved honor for her exceptional groundbreaking research on climate and atmospheric circulation regimes of exoplanets.

The annual public release of ESO VLT/VLTI instrument data reduction software packages is scheduled for end of May 2024. Pre-built packages will be provided for Fedora 38 and 39 and on a best effort basis Fedora 40 (to be released in April) may be added later during 2024. For macOS, installation via MacPorts is supported and recommended.

For the seventh year in a row, observations conducted at ESO’s observatories have led to more than 1000 scientific publications in a year. Recently, the ESO Library, Documentation, and Information Services Department has updated their detailed statistics on publications using ESO data, presenting each facility's contributions in 2023.

The Call for Proposals for observations at ESO telescopes in Period 114 (1 October 2024 - 31 March 2025) has been released. Please consult the Period 114 document before applying for time on ESO telescopes. All technical information about the offered instruments and facilities is contained on ESO web pages that are linked from the Call. The proposal submission deadline is 12:00 CET 21 March 2024.

To keep ALMA at the forefront of technology, ESO collaborates closely with the member state institutes, who are invited to submit proposals for development studies through a call for proposals issued by the contracts and procurements department. The evaluation of the latest call has now been completed and seven new agreements have been signed. Five of these studies are directly supporting the ALMA wideband sensitivity upgrade (WSU), an ambitious project to increase ALMA's instantaneous bandwidth by up to four times. The two remaining studies are working to bring advanced data products for ALMA and exploring the science cases for focal plane arrays on ALMA.

The call for abstracts and registration page of the workshop ‘New Heights in Planet Formation’ will open on 1^st March. The deadline for the submission of abstracts is the 31^st March 2024. Please note that ESO has a limited budget to support early career participants without funding.

ESO is pleased to announce the conference “Hey GPT! Can you help me understand the Universe?” from 23 to 27 September 2024. The conference will be held fully online (as a Zoom meeting and broadcast live on YouTube). It is anticipated the live programme to start around 2 pm CEST and finish around 6 pm CEST. The conference, aimed primarily at astronomers, will focus on the impact of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLM), such as the generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) languages, on science and mostly on astronomy.