Every Summer, the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI) hosts the Sagan Workshop, which sets out to advance scientific and technical understanding of the objectives of the NASA Exoplanet Exploration Program, and is aimed primarily at early career scientists.
This year, the topic was Exoplanetary System Demographics: Theory and Observations. From the conference web page: “The 2015 Sagan Summer Workshop will explore exoplanetary systems through the combined lens of theory and observations. Several observational techniques have now detected and characterized exoplanets, resulting in a large population of known systems. Theoretical models, meanwhile, can synthesize populations of planetary systems as a function of the input physics. Differences between the predicted and the observed distributions of planets provide strong constraints on the physical processes that determine how planetary systems form and evolve, ruling out some old theories while suggesting new ones. Leaders in the field will summarize the current state of the art in exoplanet observations and planet formation theory. Observations needed to discriminate between competing theories will be discussed and compared against the expected improvements in exoplanet detection limits.”
The standards of presentations was uniformly high, and you can see them here, along with the full agenda here.
Here are three of my favorite videos:
Gary Blackwood, introducing the NASA Exoplanet Exploration Program:
Transit Surveys, by Courtney Dressing:
and Imaging Surveys, by Beth Biller: