Meet the teacher

The Researchers in Residence Scheme pairs you with a local school and teacher that match the information in your application form.  I slightly landed on my feet with mine as while discussing the scheme with a friend who is a local geography teacher she became very excited and after running it past her Head Teacher, she signed up to the scheme and I got paired with her and St Roberts of Newminster in Washington.  Miss Quinn and I have met a couple of times at school, firstly to get an overview of what I can bring to the school and a second meeting to finalise the details.  She is really excited and all the teachers in the Geography Department seem really lovely.  It is less than two weeks now until I go into the school, for real!  I am now busy trying to get all the material for the placement ready.

Training

As part of the Researchers in Residence you are required to take part in a days training.  This is a very good thing as though I think it is a great scheme, it is a little scary to go beyond the walls of the University to a local school.  My training day was in Edinburgh in November, just as the snow started to fall.  It was an early start and I had time for a coffee and cake when I luckily arrived in Edinburgh on time and then made my way to the amazing Dynamic Earth centre (http://www.dynamicearth.co.uk/). 

This engraved rock outside Dynamic Earth makes it clear reconstructing past sea level and environmental change is important for the future.

The day consisted of some fantastically over excited trainers David and Ben, a Researchers in Residence contact Fiona, about 20 nervous PhD students and postdocs (mainly from Scottish Universities) and lots of ideas about what your placement could involve.  David, Ben and Fiona also went through the practical day-to-day points of being involved in the scheme and some of the issues you may encounter, as well as how to get round them.  A PhD student who had participated in the scheme last year explained what she and her colleagues had done in their school.  She also gave some suggestions of things to learn from their experience.  I came out of it tired but excited, and on the train home quickly wrote down lots of ideas.  It was invaluable and anyone else thinking about taking part in the scheme should be reassured that you will receive the support you require and you can ask any questions you want.

Researchers in Residence

Part of being a modern scientist involves outreach.  It is all very well being sat in your office or lab but if no one outside of the University has any idea what you are up to it is a bit pointless.  Science should be of value to people and knowledge, and in the modern climate taxpayers want to know what happens to money that goes to Research Councils that fund UK science.  As a result, the Research Councils (rightly) ask their funded researchers to take part in some outreach activities.

I personally believe there is a lot of power in taking science from inside the nations Universities out to young people.  Young people have a hunger for knowledge, they will be the scientists of the future and they have great influence on the older generations by talking with enthusiasm to their peers, parents, grandparents and sometimes the dog!  As a result, I have decided to take part in the Research Council UK and Welcome Trust Funded Researchers in Residence Scheme (http://www.researchersinresidence.ac.uk).  This scheme places researchers in secondary schools and colleges to engage young people with up-to-date research to stimulate their interests and motivation in the social, physical, life and earth sciences and the humanities.  Through this blog, I aim to record some of my experiences on the scheme, some of the ideas I have had and some reflection on the process.

An Introduction

I am a postdoctoral researcher at Durham University working on a project called: North Atlantic sea level variability over the past half millennium.  It is a project run jointly between Plymouth and Durham Universities and the National Oceanography Centre, Liverpool.  It is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) (http://www.nerc.ac.uk/) for three years. 

The aim of the project is to reconstruct in detail the sea level changes over the past 500 years around the North Atlantic.  To do this, we use the microscopic plants and animals burried sediments deposited at six salt marshes in the North Atlantic (see map below).  These salt marshes act as geological tide gauges. 

Salt marsh sites around the North Atlantic.

Modern tide gauges around the North Atlantic provide a record of sea level changes over the last 200 years, at the longest, and most only cover the last 100-20 years.  The salt marshes therefore can extend these records further back in time.  Using these records we aim to understand whether similar magnitude sea level changes around the North Atlantic occur at similar times, i.e. whether sea level changes around the North Atlantic are synchronous, or not.  We also want to find out if there were fast episodes of sea-level rise in historical times, similar to those observed more recently by tide gauges and satellites. Such episodes could signal, for example, a sustained response to changes in polar ice-sheet dynamics, a process which is poorly constrained in IPCC sea-level predictions for the 21st century.