On August 18, 2025, Fr. Bayu Risanto SJ visited Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB), a state-run university in the city of Bandung, Indonesia, upon the invitation of Dr. Fargiza A. M. Mulki, the dean of the Department of Astronomy and Dr. Dudy D. Wijaya, the dean of the Department of Earth Sciences and Technology, which oversees the meteorology program.
The Dean of the Department of Astronomy invited Fr. Bayu and Ms. Ratna Setyaningsih an alumna of VOSS 2007 to talk about the Vatican Observatory Summer School (VOSS) in their monthly colloquium. They gave me a short presentation of the Vatican Observatory and that of the Vatican Observatory Summer School. Ms. Setyaningsih shared her experience participating in the VOSS 2007. There were about 30 people in the hall consisting of both faculty members, students, and alumni of the Department of Astronomy. During the question-and-answer session, we discussed various topics from possible collaborations between the Vatican Observatory and the department to financing the students for VOSS to new interdisciplinary fields in astronomy such as ethnoastronomy. Evidently, announcements of newer editions of VOSS have not circulated among the students since the pandemic. Ms. Setyaningsih promised the department to update them on the upcoming VOSS 2027 once the application is open. Overall, the visit went well.
Fr. Bayu Risanto also visited the Department of Earth Sciences and Technology located next to the Astronomy building; He met three of the faculty members that work on weather and climate modelling led by Dr. Rusmawan Sumarwan. Although the plan was only for a quick visit, the group of three eventually presented their ongoing projects on GPS moisture data assimilation, a topic which is the speciality of Fr. Bayu. They discussed the challenges and difficulties from obtaining the observational data to computational resources, and how to collaborate in the near future.
