GESTA is a research team in Spain which is currently highly visible in the international research scene. The seed of GESTA was raised in a mathematical meeting in Symplectic Geometry that some of us were attending in Lisbon in June 1999. The craddle of the group came up from a very natural context: Impressed by the work of Donaldson and by the recent developments in Symplectic Geometry in the recent years, the group formed by then by only some of us decided to start some regular meetings to understand these amazing and powerful techniques. The first meeting took place at CSIC in Madrid in February 2000. The group denominated itself as GESTA, which stands for Geometría Simpléctica con Técnicas Algebraicas. (Symplectic Geometry with Algebraic Techniques). The GESTA group has been spreading and increasing ever since.

The initial goal of this meeting was to better understand the newest techniques being developed in Symplectic and Contact Geometry, mainly the pseudo-holomorphic curves theory and the asymptoticallly holomorphic theory. To that end it was decided to start a yearly meeting in different points of the Spanish geography, related in some way to their members (Madrid, Barcelona, Salamanca, etc).

GESTA has grown from the initial idea and now it can be understood as a School in which 3 or 4 mini-courses related to Symplectic, Contact and Poisson Geometry are delivered. Some of these minicourses have been delivered by first class mathematicians in Symplectic Geometry field. Also, the meeting is usually an opportunity for young researchers to show some of their results and to interact with senior mathematicians in their area. Nowadays the meeting lasts tree or four days and its program is divided between 3 or 4 mini-courses delivered by senior researchers and 5 or 6 one hour talks assigned to young researchers.

This year we are planning to follow that scheme but the meeting will 
last 5 days.

Click here for more information about the programme:
http://www.upc.edu/gesta/