Early Career Scientists

GeoTalk: Meet Soil Microbiologist and Early Career Scientist Biogeosceinces Representative, Elsa Abs!

Simon Clark February 6, 2026

Elsa Abs

Hello Elsa & welcome to GeoTalk! Before we dig deeper, could you introduce yourself to our readers? Hi! I’m Elsa (they/them). I’m a microbiologist/biogeochemist, and I just started a permanent position at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) one month ago. I work with one PhD student, Elisa Richard, and two postdocs, Mathilde Bourreau and Thomas Cortier, on my ERC Starting ...[Read More]

GeoTalk: meet Silke Asche, researcher of the origin of life on other planets!

Simon Clark January 16, 2026

Silke Asche

Hello Silke and welcome to GeoTalk! Before we dig into your topic of expertise, could you introduce yourself to our readers? Hello, Simon. My name is Silke Asche, and I am a chemist in astrobiology and part of the Agnostic Biosignature Collective led by Dr Heather Graham at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight enter. My Ph.D. focused on Origins of Life (OoL) research and the automation of such experiments. ...[Read More]

GeoTalk: meet Thanushika Gunatilake, researcher of earthquake impacts on geothermal energy

Simon Clark October 28, 2025

Thanushika Gunatilake

Hello Thanushika – welcome to GeoTalk! Before we delve deeper, could you introduce yourself to our readers? Thank you for having me! I’m Thanushika Gunatilake, an Assistant Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. My research connects natural and human-induced processes in the Earth’s crust; from earthquake nucleation in the central Apennines, subduction dynamics, and volcanic activity, to geoth ...[Read More]

The existential modelling crisis – and how to overcome it

Lucia Layritz September 5, 2025

Photo depicting wildflowers and resprouting shrubs after a desert wildfire, taken by the author, Lucia Layritz

Recently, we had a big name in fire ecology visiting our institute. He had come, among other things, to look for records of a certain fire-adapted shrub in my university’s herbarium. While myself and a colleague helped him go through the stacks of pressed and archived specimens, I asked him why there were so little contributions to the herbarium in recent years. His response was: “People sto ...[Read More]