Travels with Science: Hawai`i -> Israel -> Paris -> Woods Hole -> Austria -> Hung

In June of 2017, I departed for Maui to teach for a week at Akamai PREP through the Institute for Science and Engineering Educator's Professional Development Program. The topic was on renewable energy production potential in the islands and our goal was to get students to approach design questions quantitatively and operate within realistic constraints. My co-instructors were also UC Ocean Science graduate students, Britt Henke and Cynthia Carrion. The students were really engaged and seemed to enjoy the exercise. To hear a first-hand account of the program from one of the students, click here.

Shortly after, I departed to Israel for 2 months, where I did collaborative research with Dr. Adi Torfstein at the Inter-University Institute for Marine Science in Eilat. During this trip, the other students and myself wrote in a blog regularly here. This experience helped to build my confidence as a researcher because I designed a short project that could be reasonably accomplished in the 2 month timeframe, showed up to an unfamiliar clean lab, and problem solved whenever things (inevitably) went awry.

While I was in Israel, I then left for Paris for a week to attend the annual Goldschmidt conference for geochemistry. I didn't get a picture, but I presented my first talk at a conference ever! I was so nervous and I thought I did a terrible job after nobody asked questions (even though I left 2 mins for questions afterward). However, when the session finished, a line of people appeared to talk to me about the work! That made me feel much better. Also, it helps to have friends in the audience to look at when you need a friendly face.

After Israel, I flew to Woods Hole to work with Dr. Tristan Horner at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Dr. Meagan Eagle-Gonnea at USGS in Woods Hole on a barium (Ba) isotope project. My PhD thesis research may not have much of a field component (let's face it, the only field work I've done was 15 minutes in Israel and I wrote a blog post about it). However, I do get to see an awful lot of clean labs around the world and feel like I learn new, cool tricks from every one I visit.

Also, what was really cool about my visit to Woods Hole is that I got my first request to talk to students on Skype a Scientist! I got to answer questions from some incredibly talented 4th graders in Las Vegas, NV about water resources, chemistry, and geology. For any scientists interested in some really rewarding outreach, I highly recommend the program! The kids even took a selfie with me!

I had a quick turn around in Santa Cruz (6 days), barely long enough for my body to switch time zones before I hopped on a plane back to Europe - this time, Austria. For the 3rd annual Base-LiNE Earth workshop. Here, I listened to talks from other geochemistry PhD students and PIs that also study isotope systems similar to mine (Li, Mg, Ca, Sr, and Ba). I had prepared a 20-minute presentation on my work but, after I arrived, I was asked if I could turn that into a 90-minute talk, give it an interactive component on box modeling, and present in 1.5 days! :-O I had never given a 90-minute talk before, but somehow I said yes. Took an all-nighter, but thankfully my lab mate, Kyle Broach, was with me and stayed up with me to prepare his talk. I'd like to think that we did a nice job (I know he did!) and represented US science well.