Category: research

My current research

A little crazy …

Things are pretty tight at the moment – so not much time for blogging. The lecture is taking up most of my time; I am quite a bit ahead with my preparation, but I have to keep up. On the other hand, I constantly tweak my notes – firstly for the evening class (adding my experience from the day class, which gets the first reading), secondly adding things I have to stress again or provide more examples at the request of students.

The rest of my time is spent with the preparation of job and grant applications. After 3 1/2 years my contract is about to finish and I am looking for some more teaching experience after years of research. I intend to build a teaching portfolio to be in a better position, when new faculty jobs will be advertised. I guess it will also lighten my load a little, should I ever be offered one that I decide to take on (many implicit ifs here). But I do enjoy teaching and would like to do a little more on a university level.

I have also applied for a networking grant for my planned trips to Vienna and Newfoundland. I have made contact with research groups working in a similar field and I am looking forward to meeting them and exchange ideas and discuss experiments.

Some more thoughts from AGU: Science & the Media

There were quite a few issues at this year’s AGU meeting, which kept me thinking. “Science & General Public” was one of them. Selling the science you are doing seems to have become a hot-button issue – especially with climate change (not) finding its way into government policies.

Sessions were held, on how to lobby policy makers on $Capitol_Hill (insert the location of your law-making body here) and on how to communicate findings to the general public, your friends and neighbors. The objective is clear: “Get your message out & secure future funding”. And communicate to the public, where the real science is done! More and more (the less honest) policy makers and lobbyists support their “opinion” with people claiming to be scientists – some of them even having some sort of scientific education/background – to push their agenda. These advisors send out over-simplified messages without giving evidence and large parts of the public believe them, because their ideas and conclusions sound plausible and are easy to understand.

So making real scientific findings understandable and plausible for the public is a growing concern and I have to say that for me this is not an easy task. I find it difficult to reduce the complexity of certain issues without sacrificing some of the results – the line between oversimplification and a concise, reduced (but true!) picture easy enough to understand for the general public is a very fine one. Even finer, if it is about advising policy makers.

Something to keep in mind and to work on for me! It is not always easy to leave the Ivory Tower 😉

Paper Accepted – Merry Christmas

Just before the Christmas break a manuscript written by me in collaboration with previous co-workers and my PhD supervisor was accepted by Food Additives and Contaminants. As the name of the journal indicates, it deals with work done on the detection of fungal contaminants on grain – my PhD research domain.

So watch out for the publication of the …


“Optimisation of a sample preparation procedure for the screening of fungal infection and assessment of deoxynivalenol content on maize using mid-infrared attenuated total reflection spectroscopy”

The title is rather bulky, but justified as it deals with the sample preparation aspect of my earlier work and is quite specific (although an important aspect of emerging rapid methods as one of the reviewers remarked). If you are interested in the big picture, check out my publication list.

AGU in the rearview mirror

I am back from AGU in San Francisco and once again it has been an excellent opportunity to see what is going on in the Earth Sciences. Apart from the experience with my own presentations – here are some additional impressions.

What was Hot at AGU (in my research domain)?

  • IPY is coming up – it is everywhere
  • Mexico City as a location for research
  • Organic compounds in the atmosphere (more and more)
  • Snow related stuff (parameters measured are mostly inorganic or snow properties related, some big transects reported
  • Satellite and aircraft measurements are dominating for data acquisition, localized measurements are mostly used for validation purposes
  • Error assessment, measurement limitations due to the technique used is not much of an issue
  • Mass spectrometry with soft ionization techniques

Apart from the scientific topics, educational issues dominated the meeting. Projects, how scientists can contribute to high school education, teaching tools were very much a la mode, although I am not sure, how some of these very spectacular projects hosted in some remote corner of the globe can actually contribute to scientific knowledge of high-school students, but they sure are a possibility to present a hands-on approach to science.

AGU 2006 Fall Meeting

Up to 13 000 Earth scientists come to San Francisco each year to hold a meeting that covers all areas of the Earth Sciences – Atmosphere, Ocean, Vulcanology,… and for the past 3 years I have been part of it! It is quite fascinating to see the diversity of research that is being done and good to broaden one’s horizon by attending interesting sessions in different fields (“You want a little Martian atmosphere with that?”), something that cannot be easily done at other meetings.

But you better come well prepared: 3 books contain all session information and I usually need a full day to prepare the meeting and decide, where and when I want to go to which session. There are oodles of parallel sessions and one or the other sacrifice has to be made.

In addtion to my own poster and oral presentation, a colleague and myself carry 6 more posters of co-workers to present. It has been a busy week so far, but fun. Lots of good discussions, questions and input for current and future research. My oral presentation went well this morning (with a couple of dozen people attending) and just after that I went to see Al Gore giving a lecture to thousands of people 😉

His lecture was motivating and extremely well delivered, if a bit orchestrated, but I guess this is the “American touch”! Anyway, one more poster tomorrow and tonight I am off for seafood. I am in San Francisco after all and better enjoy it!

Deadline approaching quickly

… and I am still working. My flight to San Francisco is on Dec 9 and until then my poster and oral presentation for the AGU Fall Meeting have to be ready. The poster, which I have put together with a co-worker went to the printer today and should be ready by Friday.

We will present VOC data and bacteria/fungi data for urban and Arctic sites – an exciting topic, because we are in the process of identifying micro-organisms from snow and air that I have collected in the Arctic in Alert.

After days and days and more evenings of data analysis, I am also getting close to finish my talk. The framework is done – only suitble plots of the results have to be included. The data looks good – all that has to be done is to put it in a a presentable format. For a while now I have been using plot, which makes nice and easy to configure 2D graphs. I can easily add, remove and merge data and decide, which data is best to include.

I prepared my presentation in LaTeX Beamer, which is so much more convenient than Powerpoint. The output file is in pdf format, so there is no hassle with different platforms.

It has been a bit stressful in the past couple of weeks, but finally I see the fruit of all the work that I have done and I am looking forward to a good meeting.

Data, data, data!

Now that all measurements are done – at least those that I will need for my conference presentation – I am busy with data analysis. So far things have been going well and I have set up quite good calibration curves for snow and air data.

I focus on canister data obtained with the cryo-system and SPME data, both of which were used in connection with a GC-FID. So I am still concentrating on my 20 compounds that I have originally chosen for analysis before I went on the field trip to Alert.

But, when I am done I will have snow surface data, snow depth profile data and air data for 20 common VOC from Alert, which will make a nice package to present at this year’s AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco.

More Canisters!

Things are still going well and I have run a full set of my 11 canisters. The system is working well and I have done a little bit of fine tuninig in order to maximise the sensitivity for the compounds that I am interested in. These compounds, which correspond to my compounds detected in the snow samples (determined with SPME) are rather heavy (C2-C8).

I have, therefore, removed the water trap (cooled by dry ice) on the preconcentration system to avoid trapping my analytes there (this is less of a problem with more volatile compounds). I am using an HP-5 column, which is not sensitive to water as the previously used PLOT column for light hydrocarbons (which I would like to determine at a later date). I also heat out the liquid nitrogen trap under vacuum before proceeding to the next sample in order to avoid residues being stuck in the trap. Blank runs show that this is working well.

I also use 30% more sample for analysis than the people ususally using the system, because my peaks are quite small. The additional amount of sample and resulting increased sensitivity are much more reliable with an improved signal-to-noise ratio.

Canisters!

I started measurements of air samples, which I had collected in electropolished canisters at Alert. I use a home-built preconcentration system based on freezing out analytes with liquid nitrogen traps. Compounds are collected by freezing and flashheating the traps until they are collected on the column of a GC-FID (again using a cryofocuser) and separated.

A colleague gave me a crash course on how to use the system, which is a bit fragile (with regard to leaks), but has been working well so far. After familiarizing myself with the system, I ran standards in the last couple of days and I am now ready to tackle the canisters.

Hosted a seminar today ….

… my first one in the department and it was fun. Not that it is difficult, but it was a nice experience to get in touch with the speaker and facilitate the session. I will be on again in two weeks – more practice 😉 but getting a little more insight and getting to know the people and what they are doing is good.

The speaker was excellent – talking about gas hydrates buried in the sediments of the oceans (e.g. off Vancouver Island). As I am no expert in the field I appreciated the clarity of the talk and the illustrations to explain rather complex processes and procedures. It is not often that a speaker adapts so well to the level of knowledge of his/her audience. The lively discussion that was going on already during the talk was a good indicator of its quality.

Link: USGS