International Women in Engineering Day

by Victoria Murphy

20 June 2018

On Saturday 23 June 2018 we are celebrating International Women in Engineering Day in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering.

To raise the profile of women in engineering for International Women in Engineering Day, we are celebrating the diverse, interesting, impactful and exciting careers of women in our Department through photos and images of their work.

Dr Tina van De Flierdt: "I use the geological record of Antarctica’s past ice coverage to learn about its future response to climate change."

PhD student Melissa Grey's research aims to create a detailed image of the velocity structure at the Hikurangi subduction zone offshore North Island, New Zealand.

I was lucky enough to go onboard the R/V Marcus G. Langseth in January and February 2018 to help collect a large 3D seismic volume in the area.

Deep hot mantle upwellings are thought to cause the active volcanism on Hawaii and Iceland. A recent collaborative seismic-thermal and mineral-physics modelling study between MIT and Imperial involving Imperial academics Saskia Goes and Lizzie Day and MSci student Rachel Blythe found evidence that mantle rocks can unmix when these hot upwellings cross deep solid-state phase transitions (Yu et al., Nat. Comm. 2018, doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-03654-6)"

Dr. Saskia Goes and Prof. Jenny Collier are two of the leads on a NERC funded consortium to study the deep Earth water cycle below the Lesser Antilles to better understand how this affects the volcanism, earthquakes and evolution of this plate boundary zone (www.voila.ac.uk). Photo thanks to Laura Petrescu

Albertine Pegrum-Haram and Susan Little, pictured left, are just about to embark on a fjord-water sampling campaign in Greenland, as part of a Bristol-led project called ICY-LAB.

Dr Lizzie Day, worked on the above research understanding earth under Hawaii, and is also interested in geoscience education, particularly fair assessment design, improving communication and accessible fieldwork.

Dr Elizabeth Day is a global seismologist, interested in using seismic waves to look into Earth’s deep interior. This lets us understand more about the thermal history and it’s composition, which helps us to understand how our planet works, and apply this knowledge to other planets. I’m particularly interested in understanding heat flow in the mantle and the seismic structure of the core.

The seas surrounding us support a rich and diverse ecosystem - yet we know little about what's there and how it functions. In Dr Jenny Collier's research, she uses acoustic methods to measure the physical properties of the seabed and, working with marine biologists, determines how this supports the life that forms the foundations of the ecosystem.

Dr Jenny Collier is pictured on a boat repairing one of our instruments for her work on biodiversity of our coastal seas.

Dr Adriana Paluszny is focused on creating smart numerical methods to model multiple fracture growth and interaction in heterogeneous quasi-brittle materials.

Find out about more numerical modelling careers on the Watson Forum, which is a series of (informal) interviews that seek to highlight contributions of women in the areas of numerical modelling, simulation, and programming in the context of Maths, Physics, Earth Sciences and Engineering.

Izzy Mackay, a PhD student, is pictured studying flotation froths in Chile last year. Izzy studies froth flotation, which is a technique used to separate copper minerals from waste material using bubbles.

Daisy Pataki is working on a sketch-based reservoir modelling program, RRM, which allows you to draw a 3D geological model straight into your computer (pictured left).

Rebecca Bell recently spent 8 weeks offshore New Zealand on an International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) expedition to unlock the secrets of slow slip earthquakes at subduction zones with deep ocean drilling. Two borehole observatories were installed (shown in the photo), one of them within a fault zone to investigate how rock properties change over slow slip cycles.

Professor Jo Morgan says "The most exciting moment of my career was the 4 weeks I spent offshore on a drill rig in the Gulf of Mexico, drilling into the Chicxulub impact crater."