"What do you do?"

Many people ask me what I do all day at my post-doc. It is an excellent question, as my official titles of "post-doc" and "wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin" (female scientific research colleague) really don't tell you anything at all. So here's the overview. Feel free to ask more questions in the comments section.

I work at the Fraunhofer Institute, Europe's largest applied research institute and one of the world's top 100 innovative organizations. There are 66 Fraunhofer Institutes in Germany with others scattered throughout the world. My specific institute is the Institute for Building Physics (Institut für Bauphysik), which includes the Department of Life Cycle Engineering, where I do my research.

What research do I do exactly? Good question! I work primarily on two projects: one dealing with biofuels and the other with biodiversity. Both projects are based in the science of life cycle assessment, which if you remember from my previous post, is an internationally standardized scientific method used to measure the environmental impacts of products and services throughout their life cycle. Sometimes these life-cyle evaluations also consider economic and social impacts to provide a broader sustainability analysis.

In the biofuels project, I am comparing life cycle impacts of five Brazilian biofuels, including sugarcane, cottonseed, and babassu, a type of palm native to South America. With data from project partners on the ground in Brazil, I calculate life-cycle impacts, such as global warming potential (based on greenhouse gas emissions), acidification, eutrophication and water use. I also model direct land use, which is tricky since (as of 2013) no standardized method for modeling land use exists. Therefore, I must draw from past modeling suggestions, informed with my own understanding of land use, and mold the method to best fit the needs of the project. It has certainly been interesting!

In addition to land use, life cycle assessment also lacks a standardized method for calculating biodiversity. The more basic question is even: how does one define biodiversity? What should be counted: animals, plants, invasive species, rates of extinction? There is much discussion, but no consensus. Our biodiversity project at Fraunhofer therefore uses the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity as a starting point and includes a prescreening process to identify supply chain hotspots, where biodiversity may be a critical issue, and follows that up with fuzzy modeling and other advanced math to calculate the actual impact.

Working in areas such as land use and biodiversity within life cycle assessment means that I am working at the forefront of the field. Without established methods to follow, I get to be creative and design my own methods, some of which could eventually have an impact on the field as a whole. It is this potential for impact and this quest for understanding that drives me to come into work each day. Having brilliant, fun-loving colleagues certainly helps, too! I am now three months shy of halfway through my post-doc. I have learned so much and given back through papers and presentations as well. I look forward to what the next 15 months bring.

LCA XIII: a conference on sustainability

Just a few days ago, I returned from Orlando, Florida where this year's Life Cycle Assessment conference, LCA XIII, was held. Life cycle assessment is an internationally standardized scientific method used to measure the environmental impacts of products and services throughout their life cycle. What this basically boils down to is that I got to hang out with brilliant sustainability geeks for three days in a subtropical climate with a Disney theme park nearby. Oh, and don't forget the hotel, modeled after the port city of Portofino, Italy:

Conference hotel, modeled after the port village of Portofino, Italy.

This was my first academic conference as a newly minted PhD and one of the first where I really felt like an independent researcher, at least within my area of expertise (land use of biofuels, industrial ecology, and GIS). For my talk, I presented work from my dissertation on producing renewable energy on marginal and contaminated lands. The audience was great and offered some interesting suggestions that could enhance the feasibility of the project's outcomes.

I also attended a wide variety of other talks, which included discussions of eco-effiency from an industry perspective, various methods for modeling recycling, many talks on food and agriculture since I am currently involved with modeling biofuel feedstocks, and an entire block of presentations on land use and ecosystem services, one of my favorite areas of research. I also had the opportunity to attend talks by at least five of my former Pittsburgh peers, all of whom are now finishing their PhDs or have already continued on to post-docs, professorships, and corporate consulting. What an impressive group we had!

Now that the conference is over, I am organizing all my notes and new contacts, but more importantly am spending time with family back home in Philadelphia. I fly to Germany on Thursday, and no matter how long the stay, time back home always goes more quickly than expected. For now, I am enjoying as much American and Philadelphian culture as possible. It's good to be home.