The Astrobiology Proposal Writing Retreat (PWR) is an independent training workshop that brings together early-career astrobiologists from diverse academic backgrounds for an intensive three-day collaborative proposal writing experience. The central objective for workshop participants is to create an original proposal on a topic relevant to the current state of astrobiology research, which must be presented to a body of peers. Participants are encouraged to use the workshop as a forum for exploring creative and original research topics. The workshop culminates in a peer-review panel discussion on each team’s presented work, leading to a final anonymous vote on the best proposal.
The prior workshops produced several original research ideas. Highlights include: work leading to a successfully funded research grant through the NAI director’s discretionary fund (Proposal Title: Perchlorate, Water and Life: the Geomicrobiology of Mars Analog Soils); and an internationally recognized space policy paper proposing a METI protocol for messaging extraterrestrial intelligence (Atri, DeMarines, and Haqq-Misra, 2011).