Pleiades Awards Committee

The Pleiades Awards Committee consisted of the the IDEA Chapter Steering Committee and a representative from the Science & Technology Australia (STA) Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee with process oversight by the manager of Diversity and Inclusion at The Australian Academy of Sciences (AAS). The STA representative was a full member of the committee that reviewed all applications, participated in discussions, and reviewed all final decisions and communications. The process oversight representative from AAS reviewed the awards process plan before reviews commenced and reviewed the final decisions letters.

Members: Katie Jameson (Chair), Devika Kamath (Deputy Chair), Yuanming Wang, Michael Brown, Andrew Cole, Jimi Green, Kate Chow, Daniel Zucker, and Sanam Mustafa (STA).

Oversight: Louise Moes (AAS)

The 2021 Pleiades Awards Process

  1. The 2021 Pleiades award applications opened on 18 Sept. 2020 with the closing date of 18 Dec. 2020 (5PM AEST), announced to the ASA membership email list and on the updated IDEA Chapter website on 16 Sept. 2020.
  2. After a request for a deadline extension given the impacts of COVID-19, the awards committee postponed the deadline to 23 Dec. 2020 (5PM AEST). The announcement was sent through the ASA membership email list on 9 Dec. 2020.
  3. The Pleiades Awards applications were circulated to the awards committee on 6 Jan. 2022.
  4. The awards committee met on 10 Feb., 11 Feb., 17 Feb., and 24 Feb. (generally for ~1 hr) to discuss initial reviews of the applications and draft the rejoinder requests. For some of the discussions one member was absent, in which case the discussion was recorded and sent to the absent member for review. Prior to this, committee members were asked to provide scores for each criteria for each application to help guide the discussion by identifying criteria that had scores lower than 3 (a satisfactory score). During this meeting we decided to not grant any exemptions to the requirement that an organisation must have a current award of the lower level to apply for the next higher level. We decided to clarify this in the emails sent to each organisation and at the beginning of the rejoinder request: we indicated the award level the organisation was eligible to apply for and clarified that the requests only addressed questions pertaining to that award level.
  5. The rejoinder requests were sent to all applicants on 9 Mar. 2021 with a rejoinder submission deadline of 23 Mar. 2021 (by COB). We did accept late rejoinders.
  6. Final discussions of the applications with the rejoinders took place on 24 Mar., 31 Mar., 7 April, 21 April (generally for ~1 hr). We required a quorum (two-thirds) to be present for discussions to take place. All discussions were recorded and circulated to any absent members for review. Drafts of the final decision letters were completed on a rolling basis and sent to Louise Moes for review. All of the draft letters were completed by 24 May and the final review was completed on 26 May (with some minor wording edits needed). All members of the committee were also able to review the letters up until 28 May.
  7. The final decision letters were sent on 2 June 2021 and the website was updated with the most recent awarded organisations and the process report.