Conference: The 4th TDAMM Workshop: Advancing Community Observing Plans for Rapid Follow-Up of Explosive Transients

About This Grant

The University of Alabama in Huntsville will organize and host a conference entitled “the 4th Time Domain and Multi-Messenger Astrophysics (TDAMM) Workshop,” October 27-30, 2025. The workshop, the fourth in a series, will focus on developing community observing plans to enable the rapid and coordinated follow-up of explosive transients with NSF affiliated ground-based observatories, along with NASA's space-based assets. The workshop will bring together scientists from diverse fields of astrophysics, including electromagnetic observations, gravitational waves, neutrinos, and cosmic rays. The final product of the workshop will be a publicly available report with findings for the National Science Foundation. The conference will specifically target early career scientists. The key goals of the conference are to foster multidisciplinary studies. Individuals who work in this area are among the most useful for society, both within and external to academia. Thus, this meeting and the specific deliverables will help to train a globally competitive STEM workforce. The conference will be organized with these guiding questions in mind: 1) How does the community enable and coordinate rapid follow-up of explosive transients by space- based and ground-based observatories? 2) How can we leverage existing and planned facilities to perform key measurements that answer open questions of TDAMM science. Participants will collaborate to help define actionable strategies to ensure NSF and NASA observatories can maximize scientific return by coordinating observations and reducing redundancy during the discovery of rare and compelling transient and multi- messenger events. The workshop aims to foster consensus on these community observing plans, which will be considered for adoption by NSF affiliated facilities. The discussions will also emphasize the integration of current observational networks, the prioritization of follow-up targets, and the efficient dissemination of data and analysis products to the broader astrophysical community. The meeting will help ensure the greatest scientific return of major NSF facilities including the Vera Rubin Observatory, LIGO, IceCube, their upgrades, and their facilities across the electromagnetic spectrum including the ngVLA. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.