Winding up the PhD stagger

Last week I did two PhD vivas. PhD vivas are the rite of passage that PhD students undergo at the end of their PhD. After 3 to 4 years work, researching a particular question they undergo an oral examination to test their knowledge about their research field. Hopefully these are usually enjoyable occasions - an opportunity to talk about what they have been doing for the last 3 or 4 years but my recollection from my own viva (almost exactly 20 years ago today) is that they can be somewhat stressful occasions as well with the candidate wondering precisely what flaw in the thesis each question is designed to expose (in reality the answer is usually none, the examiners are on the candidates side and just give the candidates as many opportunities as possible to demonstrate ownership of the thesis!).

I did 2 vivas last week. On Wednesday I was the external examiner (i.e. the examiner who comes from a different institution) for Gbotemi Adediran at Edinburgh University School for GeoScience (why the capital "S"? Drives me nuts) ably assisted by the internal examiner Saran Sohi. Gbotemi defended his work well and hopefully learnt stuff as well, his supervisors were Bryne Ngwenya (who was a postdoc. at Edinburgh when I was doing my PhD) and Kate Heal with assistance from, amongst others Fred Mosselmans from the Diamond light source. The thesis contained some excellent work, notably the visualisation methods for looking at the co-location of metals and bacteria in phytoremediating plants and tying this in with synchrotron analysis to look at metal speciation.

Then on Friday, I was the internal examiner for Sujung Park, supervised by Alistair Boxall. Dr Iseult Lynch from Birmingham did the honours as external examiner and again, all was well. Sujung has done some really informative research on nanoparticles, highlighting potential issues with standardised methods of assessing their environmental behaviour and toxicity.

Alice Johnston, my PhD student modelling earthworm populations with Richard Sibly at Reading was vivaed a week last Friday as well (by Volker Grimm, the god father of population modelling) and passed with no corrections.

So all told lots of PhD vivas.

This got me thinking about two things.

1. what is the collective name for a bunch of PhD vivas - possibly a graduation of vivas?

2. typically PhD students start in October and then progress at their own speed. Some have funding for 3 years, some for 3.5 years and some for 4. The organised / lucky PhD students finish when their funding ends, others have to plough on a bit tidying up loose ends, though the end of Year 4 is the normal cut-off. In many running races you have a staggered start and as the race progresses the stagger unwinds. In theory, if everyone ran at the same speed my understanding is that they would all cross the line together. For PhDs (despite the 3 vivas above all happening at the same time) there is a tendency for everyone to start together and get somewhat spreadout towards the end so that they all finish at different times. In running people talk about a stagger unwinding. There seems something rather appropriate about the progression and end of a PhD being a gradual process of staggering occurring towards the end!

See the world with environmental science

Term is well and truly underway, in fact it is racing past at a frightening pace.

Greenery at a former Cr waste site

Just before term started Ian Burke (University of Leeds) and Robert Woods (Bolton Council) kindly gave myself and Laura Bellis, one of our MEnv students, a tour of a former Cr waste site somewhere in the northwest. Laura will be looking at earthworm distributions on the site as part of her MEnv research project. The site has a clean soil cap as part of its remediation and we are interested to see how earthworms have colonised this.

Then last week we took our MEnv students to exotic Huntingdon (it’s on the other side of York!) to the Portakabin site. We had an excellent morning getting a tour of the facility and discussing environmental issues associated with the site. I was particularly impressed by the way they collect fumes associated with the chemical reactions that occur as the foam insulation that they inject into their modules for insulation expands and vent these safely to the atmosphere. Many thanks to the Portakabin team for being so welcoming and helpful.

Walking between rows of Portakabin modules

In the paint shed

The steel framework for our new offices

Meanwhile back at base our new building continues to grow. You can now see the framework for the offices and start to get an idea about the size. Each time I go past I feel guilty about the construction noise that our soon-to-be neighbours in Wentworth college and Biology are having to put up with. We're still all looking forward to moving in next Autumn and are beginning to think about how we should celebrate the event.

Job available listening to earthworms talk to plants

I'm pleased to say that we're now advertising a postdoc position for our "Whispers in the dark" project investigating earthworm-plant interactions. Details of how to apply are here.

PhD vivas and bulging barrels

The Diamond Synchrotron user meeting was very interesting. It was great to hear about the varied science being carried out on the beamlines. Perhaps most concerning was learning about the bulging barrels of who knows what on the Sellafield site. The chances are what ever is inside is radioactive and flamable and there is always the chance that the bulges will eventually burst! Luckily scientists at Bristol like Dr Tom Scott and Diamond are working on techniques to work out what is going on without having to open the barrels. Once we know what is going on we should be able to deal with it, that's the theory at any rate. We also heard about research relating to water and metoerites, generation of magma in subduction systems and whether calcite on Mars could be used as evidence of life.

Delegates milling around the Diamond House entrance hall during the Synchrotron users meeting.

Last Friday I was in Manchester running a PhD viva in the School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences. Nicola Ashton was defending her thesis on soil development on a range of different rock types in Ireland. Nicola has done a tremendous amount of work characterising the inorganic, organic and microbial composition of the soils and defended her thesis well. She passed with minor corrections, well done Nicola.

Nicola and Richard Pattrick (one of her supervisors) celebrating in the bar after the viva

Time travelling made simple

I had grand plans over the summer to blog daily from an excellent conference I was speaking at in Paris this August, entitled "The Geochemistry of the Earth's Surface", a working group of the IAGC (International Association of Geochemistry). For one reason or another my plans didn't come to fruition (certainly not because of the time taken visiting the Rodin Museum, Musee d'Orsay and Musee d'Orangerie) but it was an excellent conference, hosted by Jerome Gaillardet at the Institut de Physique du Globe, where Marie Curie had her lab. The papers from the conference have been published and are available on line for free.

The Arab institute in Paris is near the Institut de Physique du Globe and one of my favourite buildings in Paris. The front of the institute is designed to reflect Islamic art and comprises a series of windows each containing a series of light sensitive shutters which open and close through the day. Magical.

Tomorrow I'm off to another conference I've been asked to speak at - this time at the Diamond light source down near Didcot. It is their annual user meeting and I'll be talking about our use of FTIR (fourier transform infrared spectroscopy) to study earthworm calcite balls. If I'm really good I'll take some photos and write about it. the big news in the area is of course that Didcot A has now been demolished, however Didcot B remains so there are still some of the iconic cooling towers on view.

However, today's main topic is to congratulate Sam Parry, ex Reading PhD student, now at Syngenta, who has had the first paper published from his PhD. The paper looks at calculating how fast minerals dissolve in soils.

As I often write, I still get a thrill when I see a paper with my name on it in the literature. One of the nice things about this one is that although it is published now it has a publication date of 2015! This often happens as scientific publications put out issues early. In reality they do this as it helps the statistics by which journals are judged (perhaps a subject for another blog) but what it means is that I'm already having work published in 2015 which I always think is kind of neat.

Whispers in the dark - do earthworms talk to plants

Academics spend a lot of their time trying to obtain the money to do the science that they are interested in. One good source of money in the UK are the UK research councils. For most of my research the Natural Environment Research Council is a possible funder.

However, the research councils aren't flush with cash and funding is highly competitive. At present the success rate of NERC research proposals is 14% or, to flip that around 86% of the ideas submitted to the NERC for science projects aren't funded. There's a debate to be had about how productive it is for UK environmental scientists to spend a lot of time writing proposals that don't get funded but the level of competition does keep us on our toes and the quality of UK environmental science really does punch above its weight, quite possibly as a consequence of this intense competition.

Having written how hard it is to get funding, I'm happy to say that last week I heard that myself and a colleague, Professor Jane Thomas Oates in our chemistry department here at York, have just been awarded a grant by the NERC for our project "Whispers in the dark - do earthworms talk to plants". I really love the title! Contrary to what you might imagine in this project we won't be pressing our ears to the ground and listening intently!; rather we'll be using state of the art chemical mass spectrometry (Jane's specialism) to find out whether earthworms produce chemicals that promote plant growth. It's in their interests to do this since plant growth results in more food for the earthworms - more decaying plant material and more soil micro-organisms feeding on the chemicals secreted by the plant roots. The project starts in October and lasts for 18 months in the first instance - keep listening!

You are the REF

The earth systems and environmental science panel

Every 6 years or so the entire University-based academic community in the UK is assessed to check that we're doing a good job. The assessment is carried out by (in England) the Higher Educaion Funding Council for England (or HEFCE for short), and the equivalent bodies for Wales and Scotland. University's decide on groupings of academics (which often correspond to departments) to be assessed. The assessment is done by a bunch of academics. This process is currently called the Research Excellence Framework (REF), in the past it was called the Research Assessment Exercise.



The Radisson Blu where we are meeting

I sit on the panel of academics tasked with assessing "Earth Systems and Environmental Science". We have to assess "outputs", i.e. research, "impact", i.e. does the research that has been done have an effect on society in some way, and environment, i.e. what the place is like where we do our research. The process comprises reading a lot of documents, grading them and then meeting with other panel members to discuss.

A couple of '60s tower blocks
visible from the hotel

A Chinese pagoda that you can see from the hotel.
It's here due to the closeness of the Chinese district.

We're over half way through the process now and today and tomorrow I'm in exotic Birmingham continuing the work. More than that I'm probably not allowed to say.