Ferdinand Oberle

I would like to thank Glomar/MARUM for the financial support to participate in the American Geophysical Union annual fall meeting in San Francisco held from the 9th to 13 th of Dec. 2013.

Returning to the AGU for a second time was not only exciting because of the event itself, that offers 20,000 scientists the opportunity to present their work, discuss their findings and meet and mingle but also because it allowed me to work with some of my co-authors on several papers. One of them, as a direct result of this meeting, just got published (Oberle et al., 2014).

While my primary participatory focus at the AGU was on the lecture series of source to sink systems, I also participated in a professional development program for geoscience faculty on teaching at a university level. The workshop took place the weekend before the AGU started and was very hands-on. It involved many new and very innovative pedagogic methods to teach geosciences more effectively and to create more long-term learning outcomes than traditional classroom lecturing does.

A workshop on how to communicate with the press, that I participated in during the AGU 2012, came in handy when a journalist interviewed me on my own research. My research, entitled “Towards a trawling-affected mid-shelf mudbelt-budget" was featured on the AGU website (AGU Geospace News Article) and caused significant feedback from the scientific community. Discussing my results with leading scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (i.e. Chrisopher Reddy) and the USGS in Santa Cruz (i.e. Curt Storlazzi and Peter Swarzenski) lead once again to great insights making this trip even more valuable.

As part of the initiative "Research in Germany", organized by the DFG, I was honored to be asked to speak at a career workshop about the prospects of working in Germany, specifically at MARUM. On the DFG website I was quoted with the words "I am based in Germany but I am working together with several institutes all over the world, were the motivating words of Ferdinand Oberle (PhD student, MARUM) to encourage the young scientific talents to follow his example and start a scientific career in Germany" (DFG Research in Germany).

In summary, I thank Glomar/MARUM to support me in my efforts to discuss and present my own work at the AGU Fall meeting in 2013. It also gave me the exceptional chance to gain new insights, learn new skills, make new contacts and support the efforts of the DFG. All this is most valuable not only to the outcome of my PhD but to my scientific career in general.