We’ve all attended conferences with those dreaded 15-minute talks and we have no problem picking out which talks were amazing and which talks were abysmal. However, when it comes to our own talks, it’s hard to judge them, find out how they can be improved or break away from long-established habits (such as our layout or talking pace). This week, Matthew Herman, postdoc at the Tectonoph ...[Read More]
Happy Easter everybody! It is that time of year again when you wake up excitedly on Easter Sunday and run into the garden to find the chocolate eggs the Easter Bunny hid for you! What? That’s just me? Hm. Well, in any case, you will probably have a couple of extra days off from work and this should be celebrated with a themed blog post! As you know, geodynamics is about the large scale dynam ...[Read More]
Women in science/geodynamics: a topic we have discussed before and should continue to discuss, because we’re not there yet. In this new Wit & Wisdom post, Marie Bocher, postdoc at the Seismology and Wave Physics group of ETH Zürich, discusses a range of all-too-common encounters women face and a possible solution to awareness: comics (drawn by Alice Adenis, PhD student at ENS Lyon). You ...[Read More]
Maintaining a good work-life balance is essential for a steady career and happy life in academia. However, like with all good things, it is not easy. In this new Wit & Wisdom post, Jessica Munch, PhD student at ETH Zürich, explores how to achieve a good work-life balance. Research is a truly amazing occupation, especially in geodynamics (okay, that might be a bit biased…). However, disre ...[Read More]
The Christmas holidays: the one time of year that you don’t need to think about work. Instead, you are focussed on your family (including the in-laws), the massive amount of food still left (a miscalculation every year), and you’re starting to think about your New Year’s resolutions (because we give it a try every year, right?). So, this is definitely not the time to go and read ...[Read More]
Attending conferences is expensive and time consuming, so going to all the conferences relevant for your research topic(s) is an impossible mission. One solution might be to attend (parts of) conferences remotely. Suzanne Atkins, postdoc at ETH Zürich, Switzerland, discusses the pros and cons of remote conferencing. Last month the Geological Society of London live-streamed their celebration of 50 ...[Read More]
Numerical modelling is not always a walk in the park. In fact, it resembles a heroic quest more often than not. In this month’s Wit & Wisdom post, Cedric Thieulot, assistant professor at the Mantle dynamics & theoretical geophysics group at Utrecht University in The Netherlands, tells the story of his heroic quest to save the princess from the dragon clear a code from bugs and shows ...[Read More]
Being a scientist is more than just doing research and science. You also need to be able to communicate your findings to your peers and/or the general public (outreach). At conferences, you usually have two options for presenting your work: a talk or a poster (although at EGU, you also have the PICO sessions). A poster is often preferred if you would like to start a discussion and get lots of feed ...[Read More]
Nowadays, equality is cool. Everyone is always going on about how women and men should get the same opportunities. In science, and hence, geodynamics, women are still a bit behind men for both historical (women only recently started graduating more in exact sciences) and unconscious-bias reasons. Therefore, there are lots of programs in order to stimulate women to go into science and, more importa ...[Read More]
This week’s “Wit and Wisdom” post is a guest entry by researcher Fabio Crameri from the Centre for Earth Evolution of Dynamics (CEED), University of Oslo. Many of us are guilty of creating figures using the colours of the rainbow in their full glory – it’s bold, exciting, and justifies the golden data contained within, right? Wrong! As Fabio explains, the rainbow scheme is misleading and should be ...[Read More]