What happened to...Chiara?
Chiara-Marlen was supported with a Hans-Peter Wild Talent Scholarship during her master's degree in Physics at Heidelberg University until October 2024. She now tells us what she has been up to in the meantime.
Bremen and Bremerhaven welcomed me with a mix of fog, drizzle and freezing cold temperatures. It was mid-January when I arrived for my first working day as a researcher and PhD candidate at the Alfred-Wegener-Institute (AWI) and I instantly started to miss Heidelberg and the nice weather I had left behind. However, fortunately, both the feeling and the bad weather didn’t last for long and I quickly started to enjoy the north and especially working at AWI, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research and one of the world’s most famous science institutes in this field, operating the Neumayer Station in Antarctica and home of the research vessel Polarstern. The opportunities I get as a PhD student at AWI to learn and grow are overwhelming, as the graduate school POLMAR offers a wide range of courses, and I quickly got in touch with fellow PhD students (but given the large number of around 200, of course not with all of them) and more senior colleagues. I feel proud and privileged to work at AWI, where I can learn from the best in my field. In my PhD project, I will investigate Antarctic sea ice from a thermodynamic (and theoretical) point of view in order to explain its melting behaviour, which is, in contrast to Arctic sea ice, nearly exclusively from the bottom, i.e. at the ocean-ice (and not at the atmosphere-ice) boundary.
But additionally, to the work I carried out for my project, which is mostly programming, I joined various POLMAR courses, of which a training cruise on the research vessel Heincke (the small sister of Polarstern) around Helgoland was the most impressive. There, on three full days and two half days, we learned to operate the research devices like CTDs (conductivity, temperature and depth measuring devices) on board and how to take samples and evaluate the data. In spring, I also was able to go to the EGU (European Geoscience Union) general assembly (GA) in Vienna, Europe’s largest geoscience conference with around 20,000 participants from all over the world, where I presented my Master’s thesis’ research I conducted at the Institute of Environmental Physics at Heidelberg University. During my Master’s studies in Physics in Heidelberg, I already attended the EGU GA once but mostly at my own expense, which I was able to afford thanks to the support of the Hans-Peter-Wild talent scholarship I received, and which made me a lot more confident this time. Not only the financial support, but also the social scholarship events broadened my perspectives and trained my networking skills, and I am grateful that I was selected as one of the scholarship holders during my Master’s programme, when I was new at Heidelberg University. I warmly think back to the great time I had in Heidelberg and I do miss my friends, but I’m also glad that I decided to leave and go to AWI Bremerhaven for my PhD, where I already learned and experienced a lot. I look forward to the further development of my own research project and the courses I will take part in, for example a glaciological field trip to the Austrian alps in summer – but I can also imagine coming back to Heidelberg sometime in the future!
