EAG Supports Junior Scientists Around the World

Making up over a third of our member base, students, as well as postdocs and other recent graduates, form an integral and very active part of the European Association of Geochemistry. Furthering opportunities and career prospects for early career scientists remains one of our core activities and several dedicated initiatives and resource banks have been developed over the years. The PhD and postdoc positions listed on our job opportunities webpage are frequently the most clicked links in our monthly newsletter and are among the most popular posts on our social media channels. Our conference announcements are  likewise of high interest to those in the early stages of their careers. We also maintain a database of undergraduate and postgraduate programs and bursaries on the EAG website. The complete range of EAG resources and programs for early career scientists can be viewed on our dedicated page at www.eag.eu.com/early-career/.

 

Good to know: Early Career Councillor Sami Mikhail, a lecturer at the University of St. Andrews (UK), is the voice of early career scientists within the EAG Council. You can contact him at sm342@st-andrews.ac.uk.

Supporting participation at international conferences and workshops

Four initiatives developed by the EAG are aimed directly at helping junior geochemists to attend and participate in conferences, short-courses and workshops around the globe. The Student Sponsorship Program provides travel grants of up to 500€ for students to attend events in Europe and the Early Career Ambassador Program offers financial support (50% of expenses, up to 1500€) for Europe-based PhD students and postdocs to travel to international conferences held outside Europe. The Goldschmidt Conference Grants Program, organised by the EAG and Geochemical Society (GS) in alternating years, provides support for early career scientists from low-income countries to attend one of the largest geochemistry conferences in the world. The EAG also provides sponsorship for member-led short-courses and conferences in Europe, allowing reduced rates to be offered to student members who wish to participate. Thirteen events have received EAG sponsorship to date, enabling almost 100 students to benefit from the opportunity to gain more specialised training in their fields.

Outreach activities benefiting junior scientists

Eagerly awaiting Lenny Winkel’s EAG Distinguished Lecture at Eötvös University (Hungary) in October 2017.

Now in its eighth year, the Distinguished Lecture Program (DLP) was established with the aim of introducing and motivating scientists and students from under-represented regions of the world to emerging areas of research in geochemistry. The program currently focuses on Central and Eastern Europe, and lectures have been held in universities and institutes across Poland, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the Ukraine.

 

Each year’s distinguished lecturer is selected based on a combination of their outstanding research contributions to geochemistry and their ability to communicate their ideas to a broad audience. Previous lecturers have given talks on subjects as diverse as geomicrobiology, mantle evolution, paleoclimate, biogeochemical cycling of trace elements, speleothems, and cryospheric sciences, to name just a few. The 2018 DLP lecturer, Jim McQuaid (University of Leeds, UK), is on tour right now in Hungary and Poland, presenting highlights from his work in atmospheric sciences and aerosols. Visit www.eag.eu.com/outreach/dlp/ for the latest news and to read the abstracts for his lectures.

 

The EAG Distinguished Lecture tours don’t stop when the lecturer returns home: videos of the lectures are made available to viewers worldwide on the EAG YouTube channel.

 

Outreach activities have also been developed through the EAG-GS Outreach Program, a joint initiative of the EAG and Geochemical Society (GS). The program currently focuses on Africa, a continent where opportunities for education, research and training for young scientists remain limited compared to those available elsewhere in the world. Four leading geochemists—Bernhard Wehrli, Pierre Deschamps, François Chabaux and Axel Hofmann—have participated in the program so far, organising workshops, short courses, lectures and seminars across the continent. 

As part of the 2018 Outreach Program, the EAG and GS are co-sponsoring the African Initiative for Planetary and Space Sciences. Through financial support from the EAG and GS, two 4-day workshops for African researchers and international participants will be held, aimed at strengthening the African vision for developing planetary and space sciences at the local, national, and regional scale.

 

For 2019, we are pleased to announce that Hasnaa Chennaoui Aoudjehane, a lecturer in meteoritics and planetary sciences at the University of Casablanca (Morocco) has been selected as the EAG-GS Outreach lecturer.

 

To find out more about previous, current and upcoming outreach activities at the EAG, visit www.eag.eu.com/outreach/.

 

This blog post was also published in the October 2018 issue of Elements.

Attentive audience at the University of Ghana, 2017 EAG–GS Outreach Program.