The 5th Graduate Student Meeting in Applied Algebra and Combinatorics was held at Freie Universität in Berlin, April 10-12 2024. The meeting had 93 participants. The majority of the attendees were Masters and PhDs, with a few PostDocs. The scientific program consisted of 10 contributed talks, 2 software demonstrations, minicourses presented by Georg Loho and irem Portakal, and a poster session with 35 presenters.

The review panel has met for two days on February 5--6 via zoom. On February 9, all proposal PIs have been informed by the program committee about the panel's funding recommendations. Starting in April, the program will fund 26 projects with 35 PIs and 30 PhD and PostDoc positions.

The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded a 10 million Euro Synergy Grant to the project “UNIVERSE+: Positive Geometry in Particle Physics and Cosmology”.

We have received 54 proposals by 61 PIs, requesting funds for 71 PhD and PostDoc positions.

The first orientation session of the approved priority programme was a great success with 85 online participants.

The priority programme will be coordiated by Christian Stump at Ruhr-University Bochum.

We have established a 2458 mailing list, please encourage interested people and especially academically younger researchers to join.

The DFG approved six new priority programmes among 33 submissions. Our programme SPP 2458 "Combinatorial Synergies" will be funded with 7.1 Mio €!