EAG Student Support

Thanks to the European Association of Geochemistry (EAG), we could offer a sponsored scholarship to five students. They could profit from a reduced registration fee of CHF 100 (or CHF 70 for an early registration).

The selection process for the scholarships was on these criteria and in this order:

1) The quality of the abstract.

2) The need for additional support of the candidate. Preference will be given to students applying from countries listed in the DAC List of ODA recipients

We are happy to present you the five winners of the EAG supported scholarship:

Bibhasvata Dasgupta
Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata

Research interests: My doctoral research is focused on Himalayan hydroclimate with the aid of stable isotopes, surface biogeochemistry, high mountain meteorology, remote sensing and physics-based neural networks. Primarily, I am trying to combine plant to soil lipid transport, lithium-carbon isotope chemistry in rivers with water isotope-based paleoaltimetry to evaluate riverine erosion and carbon turnover in high mountain landscapes. In the duration of my PhD, I have sampled and analysed data from every major river basin in the Himalayas stretching India, Nepal and Bhutan. The experimental methods I use most often include stable carbon, lithium, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen isotope ratios of inorganic and organic fractions, as well as the distribution of geochemical tracers.

If anything were possible, which scientific discovery would you like to make? I think discovering if water has memory, either in its physical structure or chemical composition, storing the journey of every molecule across space and time at a decent resolution. That would be pretty amazing.

Sourav Ganguly
Indian Institute of Science Bangalore

Research interests: I am a PhD student at the Centre for Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Bangalore. I am interested in investigating low temperature earth processes using isotope tools. I have been looking at interactions between hydrological reservoirs, such as large rivers, groundwater and seawater and its implications in elemental cycles. I also examine extent of chemical weathering and erosion processes induced in large river systems of India. For most of my work, I use radiogenic and stable strontium and calcium isotopic measurements of natural samples as a tool.

What do you miss in the current scientific debate? I think there must be a bridge of shared understanding between experts and non-expert stakeholders through more and more science communication. I feel that part is somewhat missing in current scientific debate.

Yi Hou
Rice University University

Research interests: I am a PhD student in the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences at Rice University working with Dr. Mark Torres. I am broadly interested in Earth’s surface processes and the long-term carbon cycle. Some topics that I am particularly excited about and have been working on include biogenic silica cycling in marine sediments, kinetics of authigenic clay formation, the effects of stochasticity in sedimentation processes on the preservation of chemostratigraphic records, and chemical weathering on glacial-interglacial timescales. At GES12, I will present my work on constraining secondary clay formation during (non-)glacial weathering with Ge/Si ratios and silicon isotopes at Efri Haukadalsá and Hvítá in Iceland.

What do you miss in the current scientific debate? Open access/data accessibility.

Yining Li
Northwest University of China

Research interests: I am a PhD student majoring in isotope geochemistry. My research target is Ordovician marine carbonates from the “Ordos Basin”. I am interested in the effect of organic matter on the carbonate carbon isotope in the diagenetic stage, through large-scale depleted carbonate carbon isotope record. Recently, I started to work on Mg isotopes to reconstruct the Ordovician seawater Mg signature. I am looking forward to exploring the world with all the support and love I received.

What is currently your favourite paper or read related to your field of research? „A burial diagenesis origin for the Ediacaran Shuram-Wonoka carbon isotope anomaly“ by Derry inspired me a lot. It sheds light into the important role of diagenetic alteration on the carbonate carbon isotope anomaly.

Xiaoxu Ma
University of Oxford

Research interests: I am interested in the biology of coccolithophores as they are forming a major group of marine phytoplankton relevantly involved in the carbon cycle. With current climate change, they represent good models to tackle environmental stress on the pelagic ecosystem.

By using culture experiments, I am intending to assess their responses to multiple environmental stressors by probing their rates of calcification and deciphering related molecular process. Furthermore, I wish to integrate my findings from culture experiments with data from sediment records, in order to get deeper insights into the interaction between coccolithophore calcification with climate variability in the past.

What is currently your favourite paper or read related to your field of research? I consider the paper ‘Decrease in coccolithophore calcification and CO2 since the middle Miocene’ (Bolton et al., 2016) to be my favorite, and also one of the most important. The research presented in this paper provided the platform to commence my work in this field and also inspired me to continue working to understanding the cellular biology of coccolithophores.