Announcements

Protoplanetary disks around young stars are the sites of planetary formation. Their detailed information has been obtained by recent high spatial resolution infrared and optical observations from both ground and space, and wide varieties of disk morphology and disk composition are uncovered. At longer wavelengths, ALMA has started its early science operation and will explore physical and chemical processing of gas and dust components in the disks. This diversity of disk properties is certainly the "seeds" for the well known diversity of more than 800 exoplanets so far detected. Therefore, deep understanding of the link between the protoplanetary disks and exoplanets is becoming more and more important. New coronagraphs on the 8-m class telescopes such as Subaru/HiCIAO/AO188 (the SEEDS project) and Gemini/NICI are currently exploring these areas, and Subaru/SCExAO, Gemini/GPI, and VLT/SPHERE will come very soon. Besides observations, both theoretical simulations for planet formation and theories and laboratory experiments for dust formation/evolution also play crucial roles for the interpretation of the link. In addition to the above direct explorations of giant exoplanets and disks, more interests are now concentrating on detection of extrasolar terrestrial planets. In order to promote the discussion of the diversity of disks and exoplanets among related researchers, we would like to host an international workshop. This conference is the second one covering the similar topic held in 2009 (hosted by NAOJ). This is also recognized as the 5th of the Subaru International Conference Series. Researchers in the fields of protoplanetary/debris disks, exoplanets, dust, and related instrumentation are encouraged to attend. We expect more than 100 people attending.

Travis Barman (Lowell Observatory) 
David Bennett (Notre Dame) 
Ramon Brasser (Academia Sinica) 
Jeroen Bouwman (MPIA) 
Mark Clampin (STScI) 
Keigo Enya (ISAS) 
Markus Feldt (MPIA) 
Kevin C. France (Colorado) 
Tyler Groff (Princeton)
Olivier Guyon (Arizona/Subaru)
Keiko Hamano (Tokyo) 
Jun Hashimoto (Oklahoma) 
Nader Haghighipour (Hawaii) 
Masahiro Ikoma (Tokyo) 
Hiroshi Kobayashi (Nagoya) 
Ravi Kumar Kopparapu (Penn State) 
Masayuki Kuzuhara (TITECH) 
Taro Matsuo (Kyoto) 
Nagayoshi Ohashi (NAOJ) 
Ben Oppenheimer (AMNH) 
Masao Saito (JAO/NAOJ) 
Andreas Seifahrt (Chicago) 
Christian Thalmann (ETH Zurich) 
Wes Traub (JPL) 
Nienke van der Marel (Leiden Observatory) 
Mark C. Wyatt (Cambridge) 
Andrew N. Youdin (JILA, Colorado)
more to come