The 2016 Lunar and Planetary Laboratory Conference (LPLC) was held on August 19. The organizing committee (Joshua Lothringer, Maria Steinrueck, Nathan Hendler, and Margaret Landis) tried a new format this year: a one-day (rather than two-day) symposium. The purpose for a one-day symposium was to organize the conference with shorter talks in order to foster a “meet and greet” style for new graduate students and researchers joining LPL this fall. A total of 31 talks were contributed by LPL and Steward Observatory graduate students, faculty, post-doctoral researchers, and staff scientists.

Associate Professor Tom Zega gave the keynote address,  Å to A.U.: Coordinated Analytical Studies of Planetary Materials, covering his recent work with planetary materials (including pre-solar grains) and his current efforts to build a laboratory at LPL with focused ion beam and transmission electron microscope facilities. In addition to the keynote, there were seven invited talks, ranging in topics from the digitization of Surveyor era data by John Anderson to moving object detection by new faculty member Dr. Vishnu Reddy.

The graduate student talk competition was held again this year. Tad Komacek, last year’s winner, started the session with an invited talk. Judges Leon Palafox, Gijs Mulders, and Tommi Koskinen evaluated ten student talks. Margaret Landis was named winner of the Best Graduate Student Talk competition for her presentation titled, Ceres Water Vapor Production: What can Dawn tell us?

LPLC concluded with a reception in the Kuiper atrium for speakers and attendees.

	Associate Professor Tom Zega discusses the formation of pre-solar grains. Later in his talk, he discussed plans for building facilities at LPL to analyze pre-solar grains and other planetary materials. Photo credit: Margaret Landis.
	LPL fourth-year graduate student Margaret Landis begins her conference talk, which was judged Best Graduate Student Talk for LPLC 2016.
	2016 LPLC organizers Nathan Hendler, Maria Steinrueck, Joshua Lothringer, and Margaret Landis celebrate the end of a successful LPLC at the reception in the Kuiper atrium.