Geology for Global Development

EGU: GfGD at the EGU General Assembly 2013

Joel Gill (GfGD Director) and Rosalie Tostevin (GfGD Blog Manager) will be attending Europe’s largest Earth Science conference, the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly 2013. The conference runs from the 7th-13th April and is based in Vienna. Joel will be giving a talk about GfGD (details below), as well as presenting his own research on interacting hazards. Rosalie will be attending as a media representative, and feeding back information from the conference via the blog. Both of us will spend the week learning about the latest research and talking with key people that are involved, or would like to be involved, in GfGD’s work.

Academic research involves spending long periods of time working alone or within a research group on topics that perhaps nobody else within your university fully understands. At international conferences, geoscientists are able to meet with people in their field from universities and research institutes across the world, as well as representatives from industry, government agencies or NGOs, to share ideas and plan future progress.

Conferences offer a great opportunity to get your research seen by the right people; presenting at a conference is a very valuable opportunity. We hope to offer many undergraduates the chance to present at GfGD’s own conference in October. There is also value in listening to others talk – conferences offer a chance to gauge the focus of research in a particular field and the current consensus among experts on controversial issues. EGU is rarely attended by undergraduates or even Master’s students – most delegates are PhD students, post doctoral researchers, lecturers or professors. We hope to feed back the key points from the sessions relevant to GfGD, to allow young geoscientists to benefit from the conference even if they are not able to attend.

As well as attending relevant sessions and writing about them, the GfGD team will be taking the opportunity to talk to people from a wide range of fields, to promote GfGD’s work and discuss potential placement opportunities.

If you are attending EGU, come and talk to us, ask us questions and join us for the GfGD talk! If you are not attending EGU, then you can follow the conference via our blog, and we’d love to know the topics that interest you (leave a comment on the blog!) so that we can try and include relevant sessions in our schedule.

GfGD talk

If you are attending EGU then please join us for the GfGD talk. Alternately you can access the abstract online. Joel Gill will be speaking about ‘The Value of Student Placement Schemes in Promoting an Understanding of the Geoscientist’s Role in Sustainable Development’

Session EOS 7 / Thursday 11th April / 14.00 – 14.15 / Room G13

Come along and talk to us afterwards, ask questions and learn more about our work.

Rosalie was the Himalayas Programme Officer for Geology for Global Development and writer for the GfGD blog. She is a geochemist and a postdoc at the University of Oxford.