Dr. Steffi Burchardt recently received theKnut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation grant, and the organization sent out a film crew to interview her about the winning project. The VIPS team joined her on a field excursion to Iceland in June 2019, and the crew met up with us for a couple days to get some first-hand footage of those spectacular Iceland volcanics. Below Dr. Burchardt describes her passion for outreach and provides a link to the 8-minute documentary. Enjoy!
The ultimate goal of any volcanologist is to understand volcanoes and be able to explain what is likely happening during an unrest period. But as a researcher I can’t help it and sometimes wonder how big the impact of my work actually is. After all there are only a couple of thousand volcanologists in the world, and maybe a few hundred people in my field of volcanic plumbing system studies. That’s why it is so important for me to work with science communication.
The coolest outreach project I’ve had the chance to participate in so far was the production of a short documentary about my research that my main funder, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, has produced. Despite my initial reservation to see myself on screen and my awkwardness during the recording of the material for the documentary, I’m so happy with the result. The three key ingredients to get to this high quality are in my opinion: a professional production company, a good dialogue between the producers and my team and me during the whole process, and having the camera team come and see where the magic happens, i.e. out in the field.
Ulrich “Ulli” Kueppers is a permanent researcher at Ludwig-Maximilian University (LMU), Munich. He specializes in explosive volcanology, specifically pyroclast formation and dispersion. VIPS Team member Tobias Schmiedel got the chance to interview him during the Melts, Glasses and Magmas course held at LMU in June earlier this year. We hope you enjoy Ulli’s story and insight as much as we did!
VIPS team
First we ask you to introduce yourself to people who don’t know you yet, so can you give us a short introduction with who you are and what you’re doing?
Ulli
Hello everyone, my name is Ulrich Küppers. Most people probably know me by Ulli. I am a geologist by education, worked as an engineering geologist for one year and did my PhD in volcanology. I’m a permanent staff member at LMU Munich in Germany. Besides teaching and bureaucracy, I am working as a volcanologist in the field and in the laboratory.
VIPS team
Working as a
volcanologist, this question should be easy to answer: What is your favourite
volcano?
Ulli
Clear answer:
Stromboli.
VIPS team
Where lies your current, main interest in research?
Ulli
My interest lies in
explosive volcanism, and trying to understand: What is happening? Where? Why?
When? How efficiently? And how fast? I want to understand quantitatively the
breakup of magma into pyroclasts of different sizes, the dispersion of which is
influenced by various different processes and conditions.
VIPS team
What is your favourite
aspect of your research?
Ulli
It’s a combination of
curiosity and loving nature, and loving to be in nature and observing nature.
It’s the curiosity of trying to decipher what is happening inside a volcano,
where we will probably never be able to be directly when a volcano is erupting.
Thus, trying to better understand what a volcano is doing based on what is
injected into the atmosphere and how.
VIPS team
Why is your research
relevant?
Ulli
Exploding volcanoes pose
threats to a lot of human beings, as well as infrastructure, and it may have
negative climatic impacts. I think there’s plenty of reasons why we should
study erupting volcanoes. Explosively erupting volcanoes have a high potential
to harm large areas and significant amounts of people. On top of that, for
several reasons, we cannot relocate hundreds of thousands of people for a
significant amount of time. Hence, we have to deal with a natural process that
will interact with human beings. In light of this, I hope that studying
volcanoes in the field and in the laboratory will contribute in the long run to
a better assessment of volcanic hazards.
VIPS team
What would you
consider your biggest academic achievement?
Ulli
That’s a funny
question. That’s more a question that you should ask other people… 🙂
VIPS team
Well, we have an
alternative question then: What gave you the most fun?
Ulli
Okay. What gave me the
most fun?! I am bringing students to the field every year, 3 trips of five
weeks in total. Plus advising students, postdocs, PhD students, doing fieldwork.
I greatly enjoy working together with colleagues in the field and discussing an
outcrop in front of us. What else gives me most fun?! I think field work is the
BEST! Lab work can sometimes be boring as you’re repeating conditions in order
to try and have a statistically relevant amount of numbers to have an empirical
finding. However, it’s surely an important and necessary contribution. Fun
is… I was the PI of a European research project that was educating 13 early
stage researchers (ECRs). That was not only fun, it was very demanding. But it
was great to see how those young people evolved and developed as scientists. It
is interesting to see the paths they are taking now afterwards, like staying in
academia, or going into what is called the private sector, or different forms of
careers altogether.
VIPS team
Ulli, what was your
motivation to start your career in science? Did you always see yourself in
science?
Ulli
Clear answer is no.
VIPS team
So why did you end up
in science?
Ulli
When I finished high
school, the only thing I thought I knew for sure is that I didn’t want to
continue in in academia and start at University. So I did my civil service (at
the time young men in Germany could choose it as an alternative to the then
obligatory military service). During that, I basically tried to find my own
way. Thus, I ended up studying geosciences – geology. I liked it a lot! And I
realized within the broad field of geoscience, it is volcanoes that are most
intriguing to me. After graduating, I worked first as an engineering geologist
in a private office in Bavaria. However, I quit the permanent position there,
to then go back into academia, because engineering geology was not a perfect
match for Ulli in the long run. So, I quit that position, went back into
academia and started a PhD in volcanology. It was the combination of scientific
curiosity, active nature, and the active natural processes that intrigued me to
go back. That’s why I’m here.
VIPS team
Very mixed career,
definitely not a straight path!
Ulli
Absolutely not! I
remember when I finished high school back in 1992, in my last year of school,
Pinatubo was erupting. I remember having heard about this in the news, and I
remember not bothering a lot about it. It was really not that I grew up saying:
“I want to be a volcanologist” like some people would say: “I want to be a
fireperson or a doctor”. I clearly did not see myself in that direction until
the second year of university.
VIPS team
Did you have any major
setbacks during your career? And how did you grow out of that?
Ulli
I had one personal
crisis during my PhD, which was not science related, but it was because my
sister died. So that took me out for like a year. I mean, I was really
unfocused and didn’t perform well. How did I grow out of this? With the help of
my family and friends…
VIPS team
Understandable, I am
sorry for your loss. But you succeeded in getting your degree! What did you do
afterwards?
Ulli
After finishing
university, I wanted to continue in, let’s call it volcanology. I had contacted
a couple of observatories, mainly to become an intern and work there, but nothing
worked out. This is how I ended up in the engineering office in Bavaria, which
was a good experience. It kind of reinforced my thinking in which topic in
geoscience could be the topic for me. That shaped Ulli into volcanology. When I
finished my PhD in Munich, I was looking for postdocs. I was offered a postdoc
in Mexico, but I couldn’t accept it, because my degree in Germany, was not
ready in time. I basically had to refuse to accept it. Then I had a couple of
other applications. One was very promising, but it turned out that the position
would not have been filled for another five years. So it was good that it was
never offered to me. I then also applied to a position in the Azores. I didn’t
hear from them for six months. Finally, they came back to me four weeks prior
to the expected starting date, just when I came back from holidays, on Etna. So
eventually, I went to the Azores, but not as early as they wanted me to start
and it was a great experience to have been there.
VIPS team
Coming back to your
workplace here at LMU. What is the best thing about your academic workplace?
Ulli
Well, personally,
Munich is close to the Alps and I like hiking. From a scientific aspect in
Munich, we have a large set of experimental facilities that allow us to
investigate, approach or tackle many different questions. Because of my job as
a permanent researcher, and not as a professor, I have more time for research
and not too much time I need to spend on administration or politics. Which I am
very happy about! So again, besides my time in the lab, with or without
students, I have a lot of time that I’m bringing students, PhD students or
postdocs to the field for fieldwork, observing volcanoes or working on
deposits. It’s really the mix of experimental studies and field studies that
allow me to go out of the lab for many weeks a year, and then work for many
months here in the lab. It’s that combination that I really appreciate here in
Munich. Maybe one more thing to add. Munich is a very international working
group. There are a lot of colleagues with very diverse backgrounds that are
coming to Munich. We have a lot of international masters students, and
obviously PhDs and postdocs. In terms of the nationalities, the Germans are the
minority in our group. And, again, that allows us to get to know many people
with different backgrounds from different countries, and see the problems and celebrate
the various occasions in all those countries.
VIPS team
Yeah, you are indeed a
super diverse and international group here in Munich. It was great to see. Last
question: what advice would you give to an early career scientist who aspires for
a career in volcanic research? And, how would you tell them to maintain a good
work-life balance?
Ulli
First and foremost, do
what you like! Try to do everything possible so that you can, from your
perspective, be the one that is picked for a certain position in the future.
Thus, in terms of work and life balance, this sometimes necessarily implies
that you don’t have a nine to five job every week. That is the brutal truth. I
had a permanent position in Bavaria as an engineering geologist, and I hated
the job. I think it’s honest to say it that way. So what did I do? I quit my
permanent position to enrol in a three year PhD position about volcanoes at a
university in Bavaria, where in Germany, we may have one volcanic area that is
active. So the question could have been: why do you study volcanoes in Germany,
and so on, so on. Clearly, the future career perspectives were… limited,
let’s say it that way. I personally think a career in academia necessarily
implies that you are ready, at least for some years, to move to other places,
to other institutions. It may sometimes not be easy to move away from your
family, but it clearly gives you an invaluable experience when it comes to the
broad scientific education that exists outside your home University. When you
leave your home University, you will probably have a couple of points that you
like, and that you hate about that university or that country. When you go to
another university and/or country, you will realize that some of the points you
used to hate from the place where you just came from, are now super compared to
the conditions at the other place or in the other country. Open your mind and
try to follow your dream topic. Go for it! Try it! But, I mean, I don’t want to
be pessimistic…However, every career is like a funnel, right? There’s a lot of
people starting a certain topic, and not everybody of those will succeed in
getting a position. That is true for a career as a mechanic, a plumber, a
professor and a doctor, anything. So, willing to become a researcher with a job
sometimes, undoubtedly will ask you to work extra hours. I think that’s a fact
we have to deal with. But again, I don’t think that is a fact limited to
academia only. That is a fact for many careers out there. How to find the good
work-life balance? There is not THE perfect work life balance, that’s
essentially up to every individual. For example, when you are looking for a
postdoc your partner may not want to join…it is not easy! There is no general
answer to that problem. It is something that one person for him/herself or
together with a partner have to find a solution for.
Christoph Breitkreuz is a professor at TU Bergakademie Freiberg, where Taylor and myself were lucky enough to take a short course on volcanic textures (blog from two weeks ago!). Christoph is a busy man, but I managed to corner him in the van on the way back from the field trip and conduct this insightful interview.
VIPS Team
Can you
please give us your name and a short introduction about yourself?
Christoph
My name is Christoph Breitkreuz. I was born in Berlin some time ago. And I’m a geologist. For almost 20 years now I have been a Professor at the TU Bergakademie Freiberg in Germany.
VIPS Team
Do you have
a volcano or volcanic system that taught to you the most?
Christoph
Yeah,
ignimbrites and calderas are really sexy. I work on ancient successions, but I
have visited some active locations just to understand the processes. Then I can
apply this knowledge to ancient volcanic successions, which is my favorite
research topic.
VIPS Team
How would
you describe your research approaches? And what motivates your research?
Christoph
Haha, well,
I’m curious. From the first week, when I started to study geology, I liked to
be outside and to understand how rocks are formed. My approach is more
evolutionary, I look into an area, but it takes some time for me to understand
what the rocks are telling me. I’m not like the stereotypical researcher, some
people, they go into the field and after five minutes they know how they
publish this in the journal Geology. That is not my style, I am not capable of
doing that. I need more time. Over time I realized what is important to be
published and what is not so important. I think I have, what we say in Germany,
a good nose for good topics.
VIPS Team
What are
your favourite aspects of your job?
Christoph
I like to
work with young people and I like to teach, especially grad student projects. However,
it can be tedious and get on your nerves. Because with every student, you have
to start from scratch. In the end the good feeling that comes with teaching is
more important than all the negatives. I very much like reading books on
geology. And then I like to do research. So, in the last 20 to 30 years
finishing projects with good publications has been what I have aimed for.
VIPS Team
And why is
your research relevant?
Christoph
I think it
contributes to the regional evolution of an area. In addition, it also
contributes to the general understanding of, for example, physical geology and
volcanic systems. At least I hope I can contribute. And that may be somebody somewhere
else in the world can read my paper and say: “Oh, yes! I understand my rocks
better now.”
VIPS Team
How would
you define your role as a scientist in society? And what outreach do you do?
Christoph
On a
regular basis, I go to schools and give talks. We also have public lectures to
whom I give talks mostly about volcanoes, of course. I think it is very
important, it is our duty as state paid professors to do public outreach,
because it is important that people know about their environment. If they’re
conscious about their environment, they will care more about it. And this helps
a lot.
VIPS Team
What do you
consider your biggest academic achievement?
Christoph
Well, I created the Center for Volcanic Textures (CVT), which is a working archive with more than 3000 volcanic rocks. There, you can see the variety of volcanic textures. I also initiated the series of field workshops about laccoliths, dykes and sills (LASI). The first one was in Freiberg in 2002, and we will have the sixth in Argentina in November 2019. I also co-created a group among Polish, Czech and German researchers called Vents . This is a collaboration about late Paleozoic volcanic centres in the neighboring areas.
VIPS Team
What
challenges or setbacks have you faced? And do you have a biggest failure?
Christoph
I know the answer to these questions, but I don’t really want to comment too much. Because it’s very personal. I think almost every scientist has this feeling that they have to find their position in the, let’s say, hierarchy. You know, there are some people playing in the Europe league. And I know I will never make it. I mean, this was a metaphor towards football. You have to live with being as good as you are and not to become too frustrated. When I ask for money for the German Research Foundation (DFG), probably two out of five proposals are granted, which is not too bad, but it also gives you some pain. Well, the biggest disaster was probably a paper which I wanted to publish. After two rounds of reviews, which were positive, the editor looked at the paper and said she didn’t believe it. So, I threw it into the trash can, I was so angry about it. This is a difficult question. I would have to think longer about it to give the most appropriate answers. Thus, we leave it at that 😉
VIPS Team
Sure,
that’s fine. What do you think are the biggest challenges in your field today?
Christoph
You mean, in
terms of scientific questions or challenges with society or whatever?! Geologist
is an established profession. Most geologists dedicate their work to look for
resources, water, energy, metals, and they’re involved in engineering geology.
So, it is clear what geologists have to do. And then we have the basic research
geologists like me, who contribute with research, which might be relevant in 50
to 60 years, for example, to better exploit or find mineral deposits or metal
deposits.
VIPS Team
Can you
take us through your career path? Have you always been in academia?
Christoph
As a matter
of fact, yes, I mean, I also worked for a short time in a brewery but just to
earn money. When I finished school I wanted to study chemistry. Then I changed
my mind as I wanted to be in the fresh air and not in a stinking laboratory. Also,
my marks were not so good. When I went into geology I studied very quickly, I
didn’t miss anything, I didn’t fail any tests. This first part of the career
was very easy. I then found a nice diploma topic in Spain on Cenozoic
foraminiferous limestone. After that, a professor offered me a PhD position in
Chile, with Mesozoic plutons. Followed by an offer to work in the Paleozoic
sediments of Northern Chile, which has intercalations of volcanic rocks, and
they started to really interest me. My best teacher has been a series of
conferences and field workshops I attended. The first of which was in Santa Fe,
1989, New Mexico. And then I attended four or five IAVCEI field workshops. On
these I was together with the all the big guys and girls in volcanology. When I
finished my Andean studies, with all these volcanic rocks, I made a very good
move in my career, dedicating my research to Central European Late Paleozoic
volcanic systems. I found a lot of drill cores and drilling documentation in
the former GDR, but also in western Poland, and then northern Czech Republic –
and excellent co-operators in the respective state geological surveys. And this
was really a magic combination, the knowledge from the field workshops, and
then going with a new approach to do physical geology on the abundant Late
Paleozoic volcanic complexes.
To finally
get a permanent position was not easy – it took 14 years calculated from the year
of my habilitation. A long time with many interviews and application talks. I
lived on a number of research grants, temporal fellowships, teaching
replacements, and I had times of unemployment. Getting an academic job is a
machine with eleven (or so) control knobs, five of which you can turn. You need
to be excellent, innovative, show up on every possible meeting, quickly build
up a network and you need LUCK. But it worked finally, maybe also because my
last fellowship, before the permanent position, was a quite prestigious one (Heisenberg
Fellowship of the German Research Foundation).
VIPS Team
What are
the best things about the academic work place, and on the other hand, how would
you change it?
Christoph
The best
thing is that you can decide which projects you carry out and with whom you
work on projects together with. I mean not so much with the students, they need
to do bachelor theses and master theses, but then also with them you find good
people. The most challenging problem is students who are good, but who have
psychological problems, this is really what makes me sad to see that they have
to fight against these problems that they have, when they are afraid of
finishing texts and so on.
Change in
the academic area, I acknowledge it has to be competitive because we are living
of state money, at least in Germany. Thus, we have to have a certain
performance, we have to publish, we have to teach, we have to do public
outreach, these are our obligations. Therefore, I would not say that we should
change a lot in the academic environment. Sometimes your colleagues get on your
nerves, but this happens in every profession.
VIPS Team
What advice
do you have for Early Career Researchers aspiring for a career in Volcanology?
Christoph
Work a lot
and establish a network of professional young and old researchers. When you get
as old as me then you live off this network. With “network” I mean people you
can go to and say “can you help me with this?” or “can we do a
project together?” Through this network you will be able to estimate your
qualities. My other piece of advice is to go to as many field workshops as
possible, as this is where you will learn the most and meet people.
Dr Rebecca Williams is a senior lecturer and head of the Geology Subject Group at University of Hull, United Kingdom. She studies volcanic flow processes and applies her research to informing hazard assessments and public outreach.
We were fortunate to meet Rebecca at a Natural Hazards seminar here in Uppsala where she was invited to speak about the role of social media in volcanic crises. Follow her on Twitter @Volcanologist
VIPS Team
Hi! Rebecca, first of all, before we get to
the questions itself, would you give us a short introduction of who you are?
Rebecca Williams
Okay. I’m Rebecca Williams. I’m a senior lecturer at the University of Hull. I’m a volcanologist, and my specialty is physical volcanology. In particular, I look at pyroclastic density currents and lahars, and try and understand how they flow and behave, mostly through looking at deposits in the field. But more recently I’ve gotten into analogue modelling, simulating these currents in the lab to see what we can understand about them through that technique.
VIPS Team
Do you have a favorite volcano?
Rebecca
Oh, that’s a difficult question! Okay, so favorite volcano probably has to be Kilauea. That’s the first volcano I really had any direct experience with; as soon as I graduated from my undergraduate degree I went to Hawaii for six months to work at the Hawaii Volcano Observatory. And that was the first time I realized that you could do volcanology as a job. I hadn’t realized it was a thing – I assumed that I was going to go into the oil and gas industry after doing my geology undergrad and just go be a geologist. But I was in Hawaii to work as a gas geochemist. And we got to go out and sample gasses from active fumaroles… At the time, it was the Mother’s Day flow, where the lava was flowing across the land into the sea and you could go walk on the fresh lava. You could see it cascading into the ocean… it was just one of those breathtaking, stunning, “I can’t believe I’m doing this” kind of moments, and that was happening every day for six months.
VIPS Team
Do you have
a volcano that has taught you the most?
Rebecca
I suppose the volcano that’s taught me the most, is the one that I got to know the most, Pantelleria, in Italy. That’s where I did my PhD fieldwork. I spent a lot of time there getting to know it really well, and subsequently supervised a PhD student working on it. It’s a stunning place but with some really incredibly odd ignimbrites. And I do like incredibly odd ignimbrites.
VIPS Team
You commented on this a little bit in the
introduction, but where do your current research interests lie? And
what methods are you using?
Rebecca
I’m still really focused on understanding pyroclastic density currents. Most of the work I do involves going out and looking at ignimbrites in the field and applying the typical techniques of logging them, tracing them out and trying to understand how those deposits were emplaced—partly to understand the kind of stratigraphy of a particular volcano, but more to understand the kind of processes that are involved in pyroclastic density currents. You can’t really witness them in the field because they are so dangerous, and if you do, you’re not going to survive to write down your scientific observations! And the problem with trying to interpret them from the rocks is there are still a lot of unknowns, because the rock captures a particular moment in a particular time on a particular current. So more recently, I’ve gotten into modelling these in the lab. I am working with a collaborator, Pete Rowley, and he developed a flume through which you can run granular flows, but aerate them so they represent the high pore pressures in PDCs. So we started doing those experiments, and we have a PhD student who works on trying to recreate some of the sedimentary structures that we see in the (real volcano) deposits in the flume. We’re trying to directly tie the processes we observe in the flume to what we see in the volcanic deposits.
VIPS Team
Cool. What’s your favorite aspect of your
job?
Rebecca
Going into the field!
VIPS Team
How would you define your role as a
scientist in society? What outreach do you do?
Rebecca
That’s a good question. I do a lot of outreach. I’ve always done public lectures, science festivals, and festival outreach… Both going into schools, and also bringing schools into the university, which is really important, particularly for some school children who don’t necessarily have aspirations to go to university. They don’t think it’s a place for them. So bringing those students into the university and showing them that it’s just a normal place can be really powerful. And more recently (not recently anymore I’ve been on it for nine years), I’ve got on to Twitter (@Volcanologist) and Social Media. And originally, that was just to share my research but it became apparent that there was a real need for clear communication from volcanologists to the public, particularly during times of volcanic crisis. And that’s something that I’ve gotten more and more involved in the last couple years, to try and provide a clear voice and direct people to official sources of information when a volcanic crisis is happening.
VIPS Team
That seems
to be a very important role to fill in the Twittersphere. We’re glad you’re
helping to keep the facts straight! What do you
consider your biggest achievement in academia?
Rebecca
This is
probably really bad, but…as a scientist, I can’t pinpoint my biggest
achievement! I guess I still think of myself as quite
early career, so I feel like my biggest achievement might be yet to come. I can’t quite
fingerpoint directly onto something. I mean, there’s been some really cool findings through my PhD where I
demonstrated how pyroclastic density currents can wax and wane, and they can
have different behaviours at different times because of the nature of the
eruption and how the current moves over the landscape
And they build up this circular kind of deposit sheet which originally people
thought was emplaced simultaneously very quickly from the expanding radial current,
and I demonstrated that actually that’s not how it happens. It is
actually built up by a shift in flow paths. And initially, the currents are
pretty sluggish and pretty slow. And then they really dramatically, over hours,
increase to these huge currents that are able to over-top, and propagate. It was kind
of a new behavior that hadn’t really been demonstrated before. So I think that’s something
that I’m most pleased of. I do hope my biggest achievements are somewhere in my
future.
VIPS Team
Do you think you’ve had a breakthrough in
your career?
Rebecca
I’m not sure really that science is done
with big breakthroughs anymore. I think that’s an interesting kind of
philosophical question.
VIPS Team
Do you think you’ve ever had a ‘biggest
failure’ in your career?
Rebecca
Don’t think I’ve had a big failure. I do
think I have a big failing, which is I’m a enthusiastic project starter and a terrible project finisher. I love starting new
projects; for me the excitement of science is starting something new, finding
out fun stuff, to go a new field area, collecting and analyzing loads of fun
data. Worst part of science for me is then spending weeks, months, years
writing it up and getting it published. Finishing that project.
That’s probably my biggest failing as a scientist.
VIPS Team
What was your motivation to start as an
early career scientist?
Rebecca
Originally, I wanted to be a geophysicist if you can believe it. I went to university thinking I’d do geophysics, and was actually really into archaeology, thought I’d be an archaeological geophysicist. And then I started looking around universities and visiting them and I thought, “that doesn’t sound so much fun as looking at rocks and studying volcanoes.” But like I said, I didn’t think it was a thing. And I didn’t realize it was a job, or a career until I went to Hawaii. And then I really wanted to get into volcanology, and try and help mitigate hazards, to try and decrease the amount of of volcano crises and tragedies that we have. And that’s why I originally started off doing numerical computer modeling of lahars as a way of trying to create hazard maps (that’s what I did my masters in). So that was my initial motivation. And then I got much more interested in understanding the processes behind the currents.
VIPS Team
Have you ever changed directions in your career?
Rebecca
Yes. Not in terms of the
science, but in terms of what my focus as an academic is. I have a
very teaching-focused career track at the moment. After my PhD, my first
job was as a teaching fellow, and where I was just teaching at university. I
was running a kind of part time postdoc at the same time, but my focus was on
the teaching. And that’s kind of followed me ever since. So when I got to Hull, I focused on
learning and teaching and developing degree programs, and then became Head of
Geology for a while. Now I’m actually working in the faculty as the Associate
Dean for Student Experience. That’s quite unusual, somebody earlier in their
career to be at that level. And so it has meant that at times, the research has
never stopped but it’s not always been the focus. And I’ve flipped backwards and
forwards with time to have that focus more or less. And so whilst the general
thread of the research has always been the same – apart from a really
brief hiatus into basalt geochemistry (it was brief, it was dull, still
haven’t written up those papers), the switches for me have been into
these periods of really intense teaching focused versus typical research.
VIPS Team
So from that, I guess you always have seen
yourself as an academic or have you ever seen yourself outside academia as
well?
Rebecca
Yeah, I mean, I had a couple years out,
between my undergraduate and my Masters. I was actually
working as a PADI scuba diver! Working in a school as a PADI dive master and working in a dive shop. Which was
great, that was awesome fun. But as soon as I went back to do my Masters, it
then became my focus to stay in academia.
VIPS Team
What are some of the major problems or
setbacks you have encountered?
Rebecca
I suppose sometimes that teaching focus has
meant I haven’t been able to do as much research as I always wanted to, and I
haven’t always been able to publish as quickly, (as well as my deep
dislike of the process) as much as I wanted to. And that kind of makes it hard… It’s now
hard for me to get the funding, because I haven’t got that really research-focused CV,
so now I’m kind of trying to build that up more. People
often see me as a quite a teaching focused academic. So at the moment, especially with the funding and climate in the UK, it’s really
difficult to get grants. And you can’t do field work without grants, which is
one of the reasons why analogue modeling is so useful as a research technique.
And so I think that’s one of the big setbacks, is just trying to get
funding to start developing these big projects.
VIPS Team
In your view, what are the things you like
most about the academic workplace?
Rebecca
That I do something different nearly every
day. One day, I could be working on a paper with my
student about analogue modelling. Another day, I could be going to a
completely different department in my faculty to work on a student
experience problem. Another day I could be meeting with the university
leadership team about something. Another day I might be planning a field trip
to take students to teach, another day planning my research, or finding
myself in Uppsala talking to a whole new research group! So, I think that
continuous variety, is what makes it so fun. So exciting.
VIPS Team
The opposite: How would you change the
academic workplace if you could?
Rebecca
Less admin and less paperwork. We love paperwork. It’s
insane. There’s a form for everything. There’s a process for everything.
There’s bureaucracy around everything.
VIPS Team
That is one
of the necessary evils. What advice would you
give early career people who aspire to have a career in geoscience, or volcanology specifically?
Rebecca
I would say always do what you enjoy. And always chase the opportunities that you fancy. People are always going to be giving you conflicting advice,and pulling you in different directions, and saying, “if you want to do this, then you need to be doing this”, but actually, I think what I found is that taking chances on opportunities has led tothings I never thought would happen. For example, when I first applied to Hull there wasn’t a geology degree program, they were just starting it up. And a lot of the advice that I had from people like my PhD supervisory team and postdocs, people around that time was, “you’re just going to do loads of teaching, and it’s not a great place, you should take some time out, write your papers and go get a postdoc”, and I didn’t listen to any of that. I thought, “Well, it sounds like fun. And it’s in the same county as my soon-to-be husband.” And actually it opened really big doors for me. I was able to establish my career there. And I thought that it sounded like a fun opportunity to start a geology degree program up from scratch. And it was. And it has enabled me to have huge amounts of freedom in what I teach. And being in a department where geology was just part of geography and environmental sciences, it has also opened up collaborations I would never have been able to do if I was in a traditional geology department. I’ve been working with a PhD student, and she’s been doing historical social volcanology, looking at archive work. And that would never have been an opportunity if I stayed in a more traditional department.
So there is no correct career path. And there’s no
correct career advice, I think. Just always chase the opportunities that look
fun and interesting.
VIPS Team
And because there’s so much talk on the
Twittersphere about mental health in academia, what advice would you
give to an early career scientist? And how do you maintain a healthy work-life
balance?
Rebecca
I would say that only you can be in control
of a work-life balance, and you have to set your own boundaries and try and
stick to them. I did not have a healthy work-life balance during my
PhD. I would work evenings, weekends. And then my first job as a
teaching fellow I was only supposed to be 60% part time…. I tracked my hours
for a couple of weeks and I was doing 70 hours a week, which is way more than
100% job, let alone a 60% job! And so when I moved to Hull I made the decision
to change that. I wanted something different. My new rules were that
I wouldn’t work the weekends. And I would work perhaps in the evening if I had
a big deadline. But now I try, I really do try to put my job in between like nine to five, and I don’t
work evenings and weekends. I try and encourage that kind of behavior
in the people around me,
too, so I don’t do things like send emails on a
Friday evening and over the weekend expecting responses.
But equally, people have different working patterns. I know people
that like to work late in the evening, because that’s when it’s good for
them. So I think it’s important to respect that people have different working
patterns and just find what suits you, and have other stuff to do
outside of the university,
whether that’s running, cycling, another hobby… it’s really
important to keep that.
Also, having a baby’s absolutely forced me to have good work-life
balance. Because she doesn’t let me work in the evenings and weekends, even if
I wanted to.
VIPS Team
Is there any other question we should have
asked you, or anything else you want to say?
Rebecca
No I don’t think so.. Academia can be really hard. Research can be really hard. But it also can be enormous amounts of fun, and I’m working with such varied and inspiring people. It’s really great. So if that’s something you’re interested in doing, then it’s a great thing to do.
VIPS Team
Thank you
so much for your time! We wish you all the best!
Dave McGarvie is a Honorary researcher at the Lancaster University in the United Kingdom (link: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/). His research focuses on volcano-ice interactions in Iceland and Chile and their effect for the communities. Dave is also really active on Twitter (@subglacial), where he posts volcano-related images with a short explanation.
We were fortunate that Dave gave a seminar in Uppsala earlier this year. And more recently he joined the VIPS team on a field excursion in Iceland, where we used our chance to ask him a few questions about his multifaceted career. We hope you enjoy getting to know him as much as we did!
VIPS
Team
Thanks for joining us for an interview! Can
you briefly describe yourself and what you do?
Dave
McGarvie
My name is Dave McGarvie. I work primarily
in Iceland, and I’ve worked on a variety of volcanoes and volcanic problems
there. I have a particular interest in rhyolites. In the last couple of
decades, I changed tactic from looking at subaerial rhyolites and their
geochemistry, to looking at rhyolite volcano-ice interactions as they were less
studied when I re-started my research career in 1996, and now they’re much
better studied.
VIPS
Team
How would you describe your approach to
conducting research?
Dave McGarvie
I still believe that good fieldwork with careful, appropriate, and relevant observations is the foundation of good volcanology. Sadly, I’ve seen many examples throughout my career of poor observations being made by people and leading to poor science. For example, hasty collection of samples for a geochemical study without understanding the volcanological context. Such poor studies lead to misleading interpretations that can persist for a long time before people correct them. When I’ve been working with my students and colleagues, I stress that good fieldwork is absolutely the foundation.
VIPS
Team
What motivates your research?
Dave
McGarvie
I like the discovery and the exploration, going
to remote places and finding new things that nobody’s actually looked at
before. You know, as a geologist in Iceland you walk places where no other
human beings have ever set foot. That’s quite a privilege. It’s quite special.
So yeah, that’s a large part of it for me. And quite often, I’ll be sitting up
somewhere thinking, “I’m getting paid to do this!” Luckily, in Iceland there’s
lots of wonderful unexplored remote places where there is great geology still
to be explored.
VIPS
team
One of the hardest questions. Do you have a
favourite volcano or do you have a volcano that you think has taught you the
most?
Dave
McGarvie
I would have to say Torfajökull because
that’s the volcano where I did my PhD, and where I first took a proper look at rhyolite
volcano-ice interactions. It has got such a variety, and it really opened my eyes
to how much more interesting rhyolite volcano-interactions are compared to basalt.
My basalt friends won’t like that, but it’s true.
VIPS
team
Why is your research relevant? And what are
the possible applications for your research?
Dave
McGarvie
It is particularly relevant to local communities and scientists in Iceland, because I don’t think the Icelanders have a full understanding of what can happen when volcanoes and ice interact. This is despite the fact that it’s very commonplace in Iceland. The Icelanders have a good handle on what happens with the main volcanoes that pop off frequently, for example Grímsvötn. They got a wake-up call in 2010 when Eyjafjallajökull erupted, but they had a great plan sorted out for evacuation when it did erupt, and it was successful. And whilst other parts of the world are more aware of the problems and hazards from ice-capped stratovolcanoes, I think that more work needs to be done in Iceland on these.
VIPS
team
How would you define your role as a
scientist in society, and what outreach do you do?
Dave
McGarvie
I believe it is vital for scientists to
communicate their research to the wider community and to the public, wherever
possible. I have given dozens of talks to various public audiences, and I love
it, but it is quite hard work. It can be harder to convey complex processes to
members of the public than to scientists.
I am active on Twitter (@subglacial) and
post the occasional volcanological image with a bit of a description about it. I
have met people at some public lectures that have said that they really enjoyed
what I said on Twitter and that is why they came along to my lecture.
And of course, when eruptions go off in Iceland
or there are other discussions about volcanism in the world, then the media
gets in touch. And I find it quite interesting (irritating, in fact) that there
are certain people who like to put themselves in front of the media,
irrespective of their knowledge of the subject. I have found myself on
occasions contacting journalists on the quiet and correcting some of what my
colleagues have said. I’ve got a strong view that not just anybody should be
talking to the media about volcanic eruptions, but it should be somebody who’s
well informed, and can give a deeper background to the volcano, or to the
volcanic area, because they have worked there.
VIPS
Team
As you’ve done most of your work in
Iceland, why Iceland?
Dave
McGarvie
If you’re looking for the best place to
study volcano-ice interactions with the widest variety of compositions, that
has to be Iceland. Although, in the past few years I have been working on a
Chilean volcano that contains a surprising diversity of volcano-ice
interactions, and I’m looking forward to writing up this research.
VIPS
Team
What do you consider your biggest
achievement in your career? Do you do you think you’ve ever had a breakthrough
moment?
Dave
McGarvie
I’d say my biggest achievement has been to successfully
nurture good PhD students, giving them a good experience both in the field and
in support afterwards, all aimed at enabling them to do good PhDs and publish
good papers so that they can have the option of developing academic careers. The
ones who are really good, they are wonderful to supervise. They can be
difficult at times, because they’re very challenging and they can hold strong views
not yet grounded in experience. But when they learn to listen and be respectful
then they can produce very meaningful work. Other achievements in science? Some
were significant to me, but to the wider community there they were probably not
significant.
VIPS
Team
Do you have a biggest failure that you want
to share?
Dave
McGarvie
I guess my biggest failure was… One student, from day one, didn’t like me. It was a project that I initiated on cooling fractures in lavas, for which I had identified many world-class exposures in Iceland. I gave the student a huge amount of support, but when only the two of us were together they made their dislike of and disrespect towards me rather obvious. Sadly, right at the very end, after I had worked hard to help them finish their PhD, their nastiness towards me became so unpleasant that I said I just don’t want anything further to do with them, and so I took my name off two papers that I had co-written, and moved on. In hindsight, my failure was that I should have stopped supervising this student as soon as I realized that they were going to be continually unpleasant towards me. I should just have said “Yeah, sorry, this isn’t working. I need get you a replacement supervisor that you do get along with.” That would have freed up so much of my time to invest in other students and other projects. In terms scientifically, what have I failed in? Nothing springs to mind, I always kind of made progress on everything I’ve worked on.
VIPS
Team
What are the biggest learning experiences
you’ve had?
Dave
McGarvie
I think it was learning how to do fieldwork
in remote locations. And being sure that when I left a student in their field area,
wherever they were, that they were sufficiently well equipped, both mentally
and physically, to actually cope. There’s quite a burden being a supervisor in
these situations, as you feel a sense of responsibility when you abandon a new
student in the field (with a field assistant, of course). But I think it is
hugely valuable for students to do work in the field without supervisors around,
as this helps the students to evolve into researchers, and in a more ownership
focused way. Part of the learning process for me was realizing that I don’t
have to be with students all the time.
VIPS
Team
Okay, what was your motivation to start
down this career path in the beginning?
Dave
McGarvie
It was an accident. I‘d worked for four
years before I went to university, and I planned to get a job straight after my
degree. I had even signed a contract with an oil company to travel the world and
do mud logging and earn lots of money. And then my undergraduate dissertation supervisor
came and said, “we’re having trouble finding somebody to do this PhD in
Iceland. Would you want to talk about it?” On quizzing him it turned out that
adequate and smart people were applying for it, but there was nobody that they
felt could actually spend three months in a remote part of Iceland and produce
results. So I wasn’t offered the PhD on the basis of my intellectual ability (sadly),
I was offered it on the basis of being tough enough to go out achieve something
worthwhile by working solo in what was then a remote and difficult field area. When
I thought about it, I realised okay, when am I going to get the chance to spend
six months in Iceland? And once I got my teeth into it, it was amazing. Those were
the days when you went out and you spent three months mainly on your own.
VIPS
Team
And you have been in academia ever since?
Dave
McGarvie
No. After my PhD I decided to do something a bit different to enhance my potential career prospects, so I shifted to doing carbon isotopes in primitive meteorites. During that period, unexpectedly my wife became pregnant… a few years before we’d planned. At that stage I figured I was a long way off from getting a lectureship and the stability that brought with it. Even though I had a couple of postdocs agreed and lined up, I jumped out of academia for a decade to help raise the family. I went into publishing, initially as an editor, commissioning books, then lastly, I taught publishing at The Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland. However, during that decade I also worked as a geosciences tutor for The Open University (OU), and maintained my passion for geology through teaching. And then a job came up at the OU which I got, and I was there for 22 years until I took early retirement last year. I now have an honorary researcher position at Lancaster University, which is great as I have lots of research to write up, more opportunities to supervise students, and of course I’m still going back to Iceland as there’s lots yet to discover and explore.
VIPS
Team
Have there been any major setbacks you’ve
encountered in your career?
Dave
McGarvie
The only major setback is lack of time, as
my OU job only had a research allocation of 22 days per year. Thankfully for me,
my family has been very understanding of me working evenings and weekends, and
using my annual leave for fieldwork. I do it because I have a passion for doing
research, and when you’ve got students you ought to spend your time supporting
them. They have always been the number one priority. Setbacks have been… funding
rejections. But I discovered that there’s a small pot of money in the
university for use if you’re doing field-based work, like I do. I also built a
lot of good links with other universities and colleagues, who had money to
enable me to get my research to move forward.
VIPS
Team
Excellent. Okay. And I guess the last
question is, is what advice would you give to the early career researchers?
Dave
McGarvie
Three bits of advice, Firstly, get one or
two papers done. Like it or not, that’s your currency, that’s what will get you
your postdoc. Doing the research isn’t enough; showing you can do it and
deliver the outcome is vitally important. Secondly, diversify a bit. Make it
clear that you understand more than just your particular area of research. And
thirdly, outreach. Make sure that you disseminate your research as widely as
possible, and engage with the public – because that will teach you how to
communicate with people and should you end up in an academic career, either
involving teaching or outreach or both, the skills you develop at this early stage
will be absolutely vital to your career (and will be very attractive to an
employer).
VIPS
Team
Thank you, Dave.
Are you a VIPS enthusiast and want to be reminded whenever a new post is out? Subscribe to our blog to be updated! Or maybe you have a great field or laboratory story to tell or a recent paper out? Share it with us! We are always on the hunt for stories that show the experiences of other early career researchers working on, under, around and above volcanoes. Email us at: vipscommission@gmail.com
Ben van Wyk de Vries is a professor at the Université Clermont Auvergne (UCA) in France (link: http://lmv.uca.fr/). His research focuses on volcanic hazards, including catastrophic collapses and avalanches of debris, tectonics of volcanoes, and monitoring surface deformation by videogrammetry and photo-digital imaging. He is also an advocate for geoheritage, and succeeded in convincing UNESCO to name the Chain des Puys volcanic mountain range in central France a World Heritage Site in 2014.
We were fortunate to visit with Ben during a recent natural hazards seminar in Uppsala, Sweden and ask him a few questions about his colourful career. We hope you enjoy getting to know him as much as we did!
VIPS team
Hi Ben, thanks for being the first in our interview series of established researchers. For the people out there who don’t know you yet, how would you introduce yourself?
Ben
I’m Ben. My surname is Van Wyk de Vries, which originally comes from Holland via South Africa. I was born in London. At the age of 22 after completing my undergraduate, I went to Nicaragua, Latin America, went native and I’ve continued going native ever since. I just recently became a native Frenchman. In the time in between, I studied geology. Although, I always wanted to be a geographer and work on glaciers, which I recently managed to do. But I’ve mostly worked on volcanoes and faults. And throughout my time in Latin America, I realized that you can’t do anything unless you work with people as well. So, that is another aspect of what I do, you might call it: social geology. That’s me!
VIPS
Great, thanks. What is your favourite volcano?
Ben
I don’t have a favourite volcano. There are just so many that I love. So, I would feel bad, claiming one is my favourite. Because you’d be letting down other ones.
VIPS
That was very diplomatically spoken. Ben, what is your main interest in research currently?
Ben
I’m trying to have a main interest so I don’t get too spread out. The main interest at the moment is working with geoheritage, which is the valuing, the protection, and the use of geological resources. That can be in all sorts of forms. I’m using that now to direct my research. Whatever comes up that is important in the geoheritage is where I end up doing my research today.
VIPS
What is or what are the favourite aspects of your research?
Ben
I think my favourite aspect of research…there are two: Number one, mixing with people and doing fun things, and two getting out and experiencing raw, rocky nature.
VIPS
Now let’s look back into your career in science, what are you proud of?
Ben
The work I did on gravity deformation of volcanoes is something I’m quite proud of because we started off with a lot of people not believing that it happened, especially in causing large avalanches. And now everybody believes it does. We sort of got away with it. And I’m not sure we got everything right.
VIPS
Do you consider that you’ve had a breakthrough point in your career?
Ben
Well, relating to that, yeah, there’s one that really stands out. And it’s not something that I said, but it’s something I’ve followed up on. We turned up at an avalanche in Nicaragua, at Las Isletas de Granada, a beautiful archipelago of islands below the Mombacho volcano. Peter Francis, who was my supervisor then, said to me “this looks just like Socompa volcano in the Andes- look, there’s lots of sediment in the avalanche.”, and that started a whole train of things going from there. It ended up in a Nature paper with him, and a whole load of other papers. And a lot of people not believing what we said.
VIPS
Ben, what changed or improved during your career in science?
Ben
Well… now I think the most obvious one is the informatics revolution. Of course, when I started out, we were using paper and pens. We were still at the stage where we were typing on typewriters, especially in places like Nicaragua, which didn’t have computers at that time. In fact, it is difficult to imagine how we could have done anything in the past, without all that. It’s difficult to think of yourself going back.
VIPS
What was your motivation to start your career? And did you always see yourself in academia?
Ben
No, I haven’t always been in academia. I’ve worked for BP, I’ve worked for UNOCAL Geothermal exploration, I’ve done a bit of gold exploration. I almost ended up in a company specializing in risk some time ago. And I’m occasionally dabbling with the economic side, but I can’t talk about that because it’s secret. However, when I was little I fell in love with Norway, its mountains. I always wanted to do something out in the wild. Gradually, the options closed for me and I ended up being a geologist.
VIPS
From what you said you changed directions in your career quite a bit. That might be interesting for the early career scientists reading our blog—did you encounter major setbacks in your career? How did you overcome these?
Ben
Well yes, I encountered quite a lot of setbacks. Some of them produced by myself, and some of them produced by being rejected (the things for which you always blame the other people because it’s not your fault, you are always brilliant). And I think I got through them by being resilient, having more than one option, and always having a get out. I guess the first problem was actually getting into university, because I failed my school exams.
VIPS
Oh really?
Ben
Yeah, there’s a good club of people who fail first and then get scraped through. I did really well at university, but not absolutely brilliantly. Straight after university, I didn’t try and get a PhD or anything, I just went off to Nicaragua, and started doing stuff. So, I didn’t take a normal career path. And I didn’t actually have any particular idea of what I was going to do, but just went and did it. And then when I wanted to do a PhD, I decided not to do anybody else’s PhD, but the one I wanted to do. It was very difficult to get funding; a) because I wasn’t one of the top students who would normally get that sort of thing, and b) I was choosing to do something that people didn’t quite understand the science behind, what it was good for, and in a place that was politically inappropriate at that time. It was like trying to do something in Iran or North Korea now, for example. And then after the PhD, yeah, there’s probably five or ten failed postdoc applications, job applications, more than ten along the way. But I always had something else to take me through. So, I could go into industry. I did other things. And I wasn’t actually sure that I wanted to continue in academia either. So, it was sort of by accident.
VIPS
So why did you go to Nicaragua?
Ben
When I was at university in London, undergraduate, I met a Nicaraguan girl. And well, things didn’t really work out with her, but she got us interested in Latin America, opened our minds a bit. So, with several friends, we decided to go and travel in Latin America. To get there, we all did it in different ways. I decided to do a geological expedition. I got money from the Royal Geographical Society, the Geological Society of London, my old boys club, etc. And all my other fellows did it in different ways. And some of them ended up meeting up, but I ended up in Nicaragua doing projects on the volcano. And when I first met the volcanoes, I didn’t really look back.
VIPS
Coming back to nowadays, what is the best thing about the academic workplace?
Ben
The best thing is the freedom to do what you want, to not have a boss that tells you what to do.
VIPS
And how would you change it if you could?
Ben
The problem in academia is that it’s isolated from the real world. And people tend to get into small groups and end up fighting over nothing. And it can get incredibly vicious. And they can tend to get extremely conservative about what they’re doing, what is around them and try to avoid anything changing. And that has been especially the case where I am at the moment. And there’s a flip side to it as well: it’s schizophrenia, because there’s also the freedom, the ability of people to think out of the box and to do things. So it’s a difficult situation, in that sense.
VIPS
Okay, our final question is: what advice would you give to an early career researcher in geoscience?
Ben
Get as many options open as you can. Because going academic has very few jobs. And there’s a load of other things to do out there, which are equally as good, if not better. And if you have a range of options, and a range of skills, it means academia is much easier. You’re not trapped. You can do what you like, you can always get out. [Regarding work/life balance,] you really have to compartmentalize. And it takes time to learn that. So for example, this morning, I woke up early and I went out and I ran and walked around, and I didn’t think of work at all. I mean, I was seeing rocks and things like that, but it wasn’t in the work environment. And when I go home on Sunday, I will switch off and not think about it. Always keep stuff outside. And just remember that actually, most of the stuff you do doesn’t really matter, in the big scheme of things. It doesn’t matter to you. It probably doesn’t matter most other people either. You’re doing it because it’s fun. And if it’s not fun, then you don’t have to do it.
Ben van Wyk de Vries is a professor at the Université Clermont Auvergne (UCA) in France (link: 
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