Meet the President of the International Planetarium Society: Inside IPS Fukuoka 2026

Every month, Dome Fest West's Fulldome Forum brings someone from a different corner of the planetarium and fulldome world onto a Zoom call to talk shop with our community. On June 4, 2026, that someone was Dr. Shannon Schmoll, president of the International Planetarium Society, joining DFW board chair Ed Lantz for a conversation about IPS, its biennial global conference, and what it actually takes to build a career pointing at the sky for a living.

By the time you're reading this, IPS Fukuoka 2026 has already happened. That doesn't really matter. What Shannon shared, about IPS itself, about how planetarians actually build a career, holds up just as well months later as it did live.

Figure 1: The official promo graphic for this Fulldome Forum session with guest speaker Dr. Shannon Schmoll, president of the International Planetarium Society.

Meet Dr. Shannon Schmoll

Shannon didn't set out to be a planetarian. Her path went through a few detours first: wanting to be a teacher, a dinosaur phase, a stretch wanting to research cancer, and then, by her own account, an X-Files phase. "I'm going to be a pathologist FBI agent like Scully," she said. "The Scully effect is real, and I am proof of that."

What actually stuck was a physics class she took in high school "because I had to fill in something in my fourth period." She fell for it immediately, started reading popular science books, and went on to major in physics and astronomy. In college, she got her first real taste of the field running shows on the University of

Washington's optomechanical planetarium. She chose the University of Michigan for graduate school partly for the support network and partly because it had two planetarians already on campus and a good planetarium of its own. She started out intending to be a research astronomer, but a joint PhD program let her fold in an education track too, and her dissertation ended up studying how to integrate planetarium field trips into school curricula. That's the work that hooked her for good.

Today Shannon is based at the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University, and she's president of the International Planetarium Society.

Figure 2: Dr. Shannon Schmoll joining the Forum from her planetarium office, with the actual IPS Fukuoka 2026 conference poster on the wall behind her.

What IPS Actually Is

IPS was founded around 1970 and now has regional and national affiliate planetarium associations all over the world. In the US alone there are seven: MAPS (Mid-Atlantic), SEPA (Southeast), SWAP (Southwest), GLPA (Great Lakes), GPPA (Great Plains), RMPA (Rocky Mountain), and PPA (Pacific, which Shannon specifically called out for running a strong ongoing webinar series). Internationally, IPS counts German-speaking and French-speaking planetarium associations, a Japanese Planetarium Association, an African Planetarium Association, and a Latin American affiliate currently forming.

One detail worth sitting with: fulldome video itself grew out of the planetarium field. Multi-projector edge-blending onto a dome surface was pioneered inside the planetarium community, outside of its earlier use in military simulators, and it's part of how the field ended up with more than 2,000 digital domes operating worldwide today.

IPS holds its in-person conference every two years, on even years, and is currently exploring adding a virtual conference in the off years to give members more touchpoints. Host sites are chosen through a long runway: interested planetariums or regional groups put together a bid roughly four years out, the board reviews it, and a formal vote happens about three years before the conference itself. The 2028 conference is already set for Buenos Aires. Right now, IPS is in the bidding window for 2030, so if your venue or region has ever wanted to host, that door is open.

Inside IPS Fukuoka 2026

This year's conference ran June 21-26 in Fukuoka, on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, hosted jointly by the Fukuoka City Science Museum and the Fukuoka International Congress Center. IPS set the theme as "One Earth, One Sky." It's also the first IPS conference since the planetarium itself turned 100.

A fulldome film festival ran ahead of the main conference, June 18-19, with 43 films from 21 countries and prizes awarded across categories. Shannon called the host museum's dome a large hybrid system, and mentioned sitting in on a school show there during a planning visit. She said watching fellow planetarians work a room, even in a country where she doesn't speak the language, is always fun. From there, the conference moved to the International Congress Center and the adjoining Koka Center, both overlooking Fukuoka's bay.

Japan's relationship with planetariums got its own stretch of the conversation. Shannon described a planetarium density far higher per capita than in the US, venues that double as wedding and event spaces alongside their educational role, and a deep connection to anime, full adventure-style shows built around popular characters. That last one raises a real question: how would a smaller US or European venue ever license something like that? (There's reportedly even a planetarium tucked inside Tokyo's Haneda Airport. Shannon looked for it in person and never found it, so consider that a challenge.)

Conference programming picked up that same cultural mix: sessions on Japanese cultural astronomy, a live demo from the IPS sound immersion committee's test kit, an Open Space session led by DFW's own Tammy Barrett and Michael Daut, and research on audience engagement and how storytelling style changes what people actually learn in the dome. Shannon herself presented early results from her own research, pairing planetariums with local community partners to build hyperlocal climate change storytelling programs. Attendees could also book pre-, mid-, and post-conference tours to other Japanese planetariums: one built into a temple, one in a castle, one near a meteorite shrine, and a bullet train route stopping at five different domes on the way to Tokyo.

Professional Development, Wherever You're Based

One thread Ed kept returning to: how does someone actually train to do this work? Shannon's answer was candid. There's no real formal degree path left; Michigan State had a planetarium science master's program back in the 1970s, but that kind of structured training has mostly disappeared. Most planetarians now learn on the job, closer to an apprenticeship than a program, sometimes supplemented by system-specific training from equipment manufacturers. IPS is looking at a certification track that would give people something concrete to put on a resume.

In the meantime, IPS runs its "Weeks" exchange programs, sending planetarians to spend extended time working alongside their counterparts in other countries, currently including the US, Germany, and Italy. Susan Button, who joined the call, mentioned the Italy exchange runs 10 days and puts you to work directly with local planetarians, the public, and students. That's a very different kind of professional development than sitting in a conference session. IPS is also testing live auto-translation on its Zoom calls, something it first tried during a joint "100 Hours of Astronomy" event with the International Astronomical Union.

Figure 3: DFW board chair Ed Lantz, who kept steering the conversation back to how planetarians actually train for the work.

Forum Speakers

• Dr. Shannon Schmoll — President, International Planetarium Society; Abrams Planetarium, Michigan State University

You can watch the full conversation, including more on IPS's regional affiliates and the anime-in-domes discussion, on YouTube. A month after this session, the Fulldome Forum turned to the other side of the business: what distributors and planetariums are actually buying right now. Fulldome Forums are free, monthly, and open to anyone in the community. Browse upcoming Forums, or suggest and vote on the next topic you want us to cover.