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FYORD Travel Grant Reports: April 2025

The 17th Deep-Sea Biology Symposium in Hong Kong  I am Véronique Merten, a postdoc in the Deep-Sea Biology Group at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel. In my research, I focus on deep-sea organisms, with a particular interest in squids (cephalopods) and whales (cetaceans). By combining environmental DNA analysis with techniques like biologging, net […]

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FYORD Travel Grant Reports: Conferences in Asia

17th DSBS HKUST, Hong Kong I am Julian Stauffer, a third-year PhD student in the Deep-Sea Biology working group at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany. I work on benthic habitat mapping with hydroacoustic and imaging methods. My main study regions are oceanic island groups in the North-East Atlantic. I am mainly […]

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FYORD Travel Grant Reports: Master’s students travelling to international conferences

The American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting (AGU24) I am Carlos Arenas, a doctoral researcher from the Marine Geodynamics department at the GEOMAR  Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel. I investigate the thermal structure of the Pegasus Basin, located at the southern end of the Hikurangi Margin, New Zealand. By analyzing seismic records and modelling subsurface […]

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Not A Doctor: Lessons I’ve learned from quitting my PhD

I never considered myself a quitter. Usually, I finish what I have started: a 30 minutes high intensity workout after the Christmas holidays for example or the extended version of the third Lord of the Rings movie, also a bachelor program in environmental science and a master in marine science in Kiel. It’s not like […]

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FYORD Summer School “Dive Into Change”

Throwback to the FYORD summer school, organized by PostDocs for Master’s and PhD students At the beginning of this year, a group of postdocs from GEOMAR and Kiel University, with the great support of FYORD and PACT, came together to brainstorm ideas for a potential summer school tailored for Masters and PhD students in marine […]

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Empowering Mothers in Science

Women bring immense potential to science, yet they remain underrepresented in top academic and research roles. In 2022, over 52.3% of all students enrolled at German universities were women, and women earned more than 46% of doctorate degrees. But when it comes to university professors, this number drops dramatically to just 28% (Source: German Federal […]

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Lessons from failure: A researcher’s journey through a disastrous experiment

When in January 2020 I started my PhD in Plant Ecology, I felt a mix of enthusiasm and anxiety. I knew the journey I was beginning would be arduous, and that was even before the several events that ended up making it even tougher than I expected. What follows is a recap of perhaps the […]

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How to grow in the shadows

I walk through the forest and see a few old and sturdy trees, that are dominating their surroundings. I look up and see how they sway in the wind, but they bend and hold and aren’t bothered in the slightest. Down here in their shadow, I am surrounded by an army of saplings. Most of […]

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Overcoming lack of funding as a PhD Fellow to attend EGU 24

I’m Mafalda, a 29-year-old Portuguese woman doing my doctorate at the University of Kiel with a Portuguese PhD fellowship that allows me to develop my project with the cooperation of GEOMAR and the Portuguese Institute for the Sea and Atmosphere (IPMA). I’m doing my PhD in Marine Geology studying a natural submarine system where carbon […]

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FYORD Travel Grant Reports: Impressions from the largest European geoscientific conference (Part 1)

With this blog post, we would like to introduce and launch our new cooperation with FYORD! FYORD is a joint network by CAU and GEOMAR initiated to connect and support Early Career Researchers of the marine sciences from Master’s to PostDoc level. After occasional exchanges in the past (see our blog here), we are very […]