Introduction

The ALMA Scientific Advisory Committee (hereafter ASAC) was formed in late 1999, as requested by the ALMA Coordinating Committee (hereafter ACC). The role of the ASAC is to provide scientific advice to the ACC, the ALMA Executive Committee (hereafter AEC) and the project, via the project scientists. As requested, the ASAC developed its own charter, which we supply as Appendix A. The ASAC decided to hold monthly telecons and regular meetings. For the near future, we will meet before each meeting of the ACC, in order to deliver a report in time for the ACC meeting. The telecons will supply rapid responses to queries from the project management and project scientists, and the minutes will be posted on the web. The meetings will allow exploration in more depth of particular issues and will result in a written report, such as this one. To ensure good communications, the ASAC will designate members to act as liaison to each of the working groups in the project; these are listed in Appendix B. The ASAC members also committed themselves to helping to educate the larger community about ALMA. This document reports on the first meeting of the ASAC, held in Leiden, The Netherlands, on March 10-11, 2000. The topics covered at the meeting emerged from our telecons or from queries from the working groups. Some issues require further study and some topics were deferred to future meetings. These are listed in section 8. We summarize the overall recommendations in section 9.