Four graduate students at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have been awarded Outstanding Student Paper Awards from the American Geophysical Union (AGU).
The students—Daniel Blatter, Yassir Eddebbar, Wenyuan Fan, and Dara Goldberg—presented their scientific research papers at AGU’s 2016 Fall Meeting, the largest earth and space science meeting in the world. An estimated 24,000 people attended the meeting, held December 12-16 in San Francisco, Calif.
More than 3,000 students participated in the highly competitive Outstanding Student Paper Award (OSPA) program that allows student presenters to hone their presentation skills and receive valuable feedback from esteemed scientists.
Anonymous volunteer judges visit a student’s poster or oral presentation and engage them in order to help provide feedback about a student’s research and communication skills. Typically the top 3-5 percent of presenters in each section/focus group are awarded an OSPA.
“Winning the prize makes me want to do even better research, to live up to the award, so to speak,” said Blatter, who received an award in the nearshore geophysics section.
Scripps students Fan and Goldberg received awards in the seismology section and Eddebbar received an award in the ocean sciences section.
“This was my first AGU Fall Meeting, so it was exciting to see so many like-minded scientists in the same area for a whole week,” said Eddebbar, who presented at AGU shortly after returning from his native country of Morocco where he represented Scripps Oceanography and UC San Diego at the COP22 climate conference.
“I am very grateful for the feedback, time, and efforts put in by the OSPA organizers and judges. It encourages me to expand on my research and explore academic paths,” he said.
The titles of the winning student papers are:
- “Bayesian Inversion of 2D Models from Airborne Transient EM Data” (Daniel Blatter)
- “Impacts of ENSO on Air-Sea Oxygen Exchange: Observations and Mechanisms” (Yassir Eddebbar)
- “Back-Projection of Large Earthquakes: Advances and Caveats” (Wenyuan Fan)
- “Earthquake Early Warning with Seismogeodesy: Detection, Location, and Magnitude Estimation” (Dara Goldberg)
In addition to the honor and recognition associated with an OSPA, awardees receive $200 and free attendance to next year’s AGU Fall Meeting.
View the full list of 2016 OSPA recipients here.
– Brittany Hook