Today my family and I leave Canada after a 4.5 month exchange at the University of Waterloo. In my last week in KW I had the privilege of presenting the good folk at Aquanty. It was good to reconnect with the team there - thanks to Jason for inviting me.
My presentation included a short section on stochastic methods in hydrogeological modelling practice, largely inspired by the debates published recently in WRR. To boil it down to one sentence, better education and better applied tools are needed to improve the implementation of stochastic methods in practice. Ed also provided some excellent perspective on this issue and referred me to a similar set of papers that were published in Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment back in 2004. Ed said that about every ten years, stochastic hydrology researchers "stir up the pot" and wonder why many of their innovative methods do not carry over into practice. It was interesting to hear about this pattern, and I'm hoping that I can make my own contribution in this area as I would like to solve real problems - not just the numerical ones that I have been devising.
I also presented to the hard rockers from the UWaterloo geology group. I thought interesting work by Boon et al. would provide me with rock credentials, but apparently anything younger than the Archean is considered soft rock - well, I tried. I introduced my talk with an online quiz via Kahoot.it and this was a very positive experience, particularly for a 1 hour long seminar to geoscientists from a wide range of research interests.
Canada has been fantastic, and I really want to come back. The quality of water research that is being conducted is amazing, and I particularly appreciate the strong linkage between theory and application that is prevalent here. Some particular areas of interest include:
There is so much fascinating research happening and it has sparked so many of my own research questions in my head, as well as thoughts about what life post-PhD might entail. Let's just say that at this point a post-doc in north North America is of strong interest to me. But for now, it is back to Tübingen with a lot of hard work ahead to even finish the 'doc', let alone thinking about adding a 'post'...
You can find my presentations here (Aquanty) and here (Hard Rock Café).
My presentation included a short section on stochastic methods in hydrogeological modelling practice, largely inspired by the debates published recently in WRR. To boil it down to one sentence, better education and better applied tools are needed to improve the implementation of stochastic methods in practice. Ed also provided some excellent perspective on this issue and referred me to a similar set of papers that were published in Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment back in 2004. Ed said that about every ten years, stochastic hydrology researchers "stir up the pot" and wonder why many of their innovative methods do not carry over into practice. It was interesting to hear about this pattern, and I'm hoping that I can make my own contribution in this area as I would like to solve real problems - not just the numerical ones that I have been devising.
I also presented to the hard rockers from the UWaterloo geology group. I thought interesting work by Boon et al. would provide me with rock credentials, but apparently anything younger than the Archean is considered soft rock - well, I tried. I introduced my talk with an online quiz via Kahoot.it and this was a very positive experience, particularly for a 1 hour long seminar to geoscientists from a wide range of research interests.
Canada has been fantastic, and I really want to come back. The quality of water research that is being conducted is amazing, and I particularly appreciate the strong linkage between theory and application that is prevalent here. Some particular areas of interest include:
- Groundwater flow and solute transport in fractured rock from Beth Parker and team in UoGuelph,
- All aspects of ecohydrology at UWaterloo, headed up by Philippe Van Cappellen,
- Reactive transport modelling at UBC and UWaterloo,
- Interesting environmental geomicrobiology and geochemistry studies at USask and Queens respectively.
There is so much fascinating research happening and it has sparked so many of my own research questions in my head, as well as thoughts about what life post-PhD might entail. Let's just say that at this point a post-doc in north North America is of strong interest to me. But for now, it is back to Tübingen with a lot of hard work ahead to even finish the 'doc', let alone thinking about adding a 'post'...
You can find my presentations here (Aquanty) and here (Hard Rock Café).
