Our first call for Academy Fellows resulted in 81 applications of early career scientists from various German universities or non-university research institutions. A selection committee composed of nine Earth System and Data Science experts chose 39 Fellows for our first Academy Cohort in a two-step selection procedure. First, each application was reviewed by five experts according to five scoring categories, including motivation, interdisciplinarity with Data Science, and project ideas. Second, the successful applicants were selected in a panel discussion based on the scoring results. We are very thankful to the members of our scientific selection committee for their commitment and engagement: Georg Bareth (Universität zu Köln), Wolfgang zu Castell (Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum), Fabian Gans (Max-Planck-Institut für Biogeochemie), Jens Greinert (GEOMAR), Dominik Hezel (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt), Nicole Richter (RWTH Aachen), Márk Somogyvári (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Jana de Wiljes (Universität Potsdam) and Oliver Zielinski (Universität Oldenburg). With the successful start of our first cohort in November 2022, the Fellows selected two Fellows representatives. The details of the refined Academy program will be developed in an agile bottom-up process in close collaboration with the Fellows and their representatives. The overview of the refined Academy program can be found on the following webpage: https://www.nfdi4earth.de/2participate/academy/academy-program

This work has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the project NFDI4Earth (DFG project no.460036893, https://www.nfdi4earth.de/) within the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI, https://www.nfdi.de/).