2026 AGU ELECTIONS
Savvas Raptis
AGU Council Student and Early Career Positions
Early Career Scientist
Bio
Senior Research Scientist, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory , Laurel, MD, USA
AGU embraces the global community and welcomes leaders representing various identities, voices and perspectives. List any identities, voices and perspectives you would bring, including but not limited to nationality, regional representations, racial and ethnic backgrounds, and anything else you feel comfortable sharing.
I am a Greek scientist trained across Europe, in Greece, Belgium, and Sweden, and now working in the United States as an immigrant researcher. Each move meant, apart from a cultural shift, new funding systems, visa rules, and scientific cultures, so I know firsthand the barriers international students and early career scientists face when trying to participate fully in our community. My background and research spans from geospace and physics to astrophysics, and machine learning, which helps me connect between the different communities of AGU. Also, as a non-native English speaker who built a career across multiple countries, I represent the many AGU members who work outside the US or came to it from abroad, and I bring that perspective to discussions about how AGU can serve its global membership in practice, not only in principle.
Volunteer experience that you feel relates to this position:
Chair, AGU Space Physics and Aeronomy Early Career Leadership Advisory Committee (2024–present; member since 2022), advocating for early-career scientists. Group Leader, National Science Foundation (NSF) Geospace Environment Modeling (GEM) Focus Group on Multiscale Dayside Transients (2025–2029). Primary convener and chair, AGU and European Geosciences Union (EGU) sessions on collisionless shocks and dayside transients (2023–2026). Mentor and judge for AGU Outstanding Student Presentation Awards, First-time Presenters Program, and NSF GEM workshops. Reviewer for 20+ journals and multiple NASA proposal panels; editorial board member, Discover Space.
Q&A
The AGU Council is a diverse forum of perspectives that meets throughout the year to provide input to the AGU Board, staff, and other parts of the organization. Three communities within the Council—committee chairs, section leaders, and students and early career scientists—serve different roles in AGU and bring unique viewpoints to ongoing discussions.
The Council has up to 12 positions for student and early career members. The student and early career voices on the Council are critical to the future of Earth and space sciences. How have you taken intentional action to inspire others to advance a cause, mission, or goal? The cause I care most about is a research community that works together rather than in parallel. Progress in our field increasingly depends on connecting people: modelers with observers, mission teams with each other, and students with those a few steps ahead. My intentional action has been to help build the venues where that happens. I organize workshops, convene and chair sessions at AGU and EGU, and lead a multi-year NSF GEM Focus Group, all with the same underlying purpose: give researchers, especially early career ones, a stage to showcase their work, and create an environment where we decide together which science questions to tackle and how. For the same reason I get involved in multiple missions and science teams. Each one is a chance to link communities that would otherwise not talk to each other, and to keep our data, tools, and results open so everyone can build on them. Mentoring is the same idea at a smaller scale. With first-time presenters, students, and interns, I mostly try to offer what helped me at that stage: honest feedback, some context on how the community works, and the sense that their work is welcome. This is how I believe a healthy scientific community functions and ensures to have a future, colleagues making room for one another, and I have seen small efforts of this kind go a long way.