"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.

Kodachrome

I recently heard about some photos that have been attracting Internet attention lately. They are primarily from the 1930s and 1940s and were taken with Kodachrome, one of the first color films. (Wikipedia offers an introduction to Kodachrome here.)

I've seen some beautiful travel photos, but these take my breath away. Really, take a look.

[Footnote: Those of you with an interest in technology and sci-fi might also be reminded of Walter Tevis' 1963 novel The Man Who Fell to Earth. At least I was.]

Next up on the blog: how to survive and prosper in an international post-doc (or any position abroad/in Germany.) I have gathered my fair share of experience and advice in these past nine months!

Friends & Good Ol' Times

I recently visited my German host family from high school. As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, I spent my last semester of high school in Germany with some of the fabulous people below. (Not everyone could make it over the weekend, so watch out for the second edition of this photo at some later date!)

The weekend was full of biking and canoeing along a nearby river, later looking at vacation photos from Portugal, and catching up over good food, including the typical German afternoon cake and coffee.

As we told stories, I thought about how much that final semester of high school influenced where I am today. Without a doubt, spending it in Germany played a huge role in me double-majoring in German, later traveling and studying in German-speaking countries, and setting the stage for future endeavors, such as my post-doc.

This week, the higher education publication The Chronicle printed an article on the current state of German departments at U.S. colleges and universities. (Hint: it's not good.) The article, entitled "Don't Ditch Deutsch", laments the diminishing number of German departments offering traditional literature courses, as well as the diminishing number of German departments overall. Those departments offering fewer literature courses are instead opting for more "practical" business and other professional German courses. (Why can't we offer both?) I, for one, cannot imagine my college experience without our German department, and studying literature was a huge part of that experience. Writing for those German lit classes even improved my scientific writing, much to the surprise of my purely technically-minded engineering peers.

Given the current state of affairs, the author argues for the integration of German topics into related courses: Marx in Political Science, Jelinek in Women's Studies, and so on. Whether this approach works (or is even needed) depends on the institution, but I think we can all agree that losing our German departments and our German teachers would be a substantial loss indeed -- not only at the universities, but at every level of education. Offering fewer opportunities to learn German means offering fewer opportunities to make a difference in the German-sepaking world. And after all, you never know where one single course may lead.

Read the article while it's still paywall-free here.

Dinner on the Balcony

This is my view every summer evening, for as long as it is warm enough to eat outside. It certainly is nice to have an apartment with a balcony!

Evolving Roles

It's official: I have my first academic advisee. As of this week, I am advising an undergraduate environmental engineering student who is writing his thesis (in German) on soybean biodiesel conversion processes in Brazil. While I've mentored and managed both college and high school students before, this is my very first involvement with the writing of a thesis. As an undergraduate, this student is still learning how to do "real" research, so I will be helping him with all the major aspects: from the literature search to critical analysis to scientific writing. I may be a tad excited.

Betriebsausflug: a field trip about ... windows?

Bright and early Monday morning, I boarded a chartered bus to a town I had never heard of: Marktheidenfeld, Germany -- 100 miles northeast of Stuttgart and 50 miles southeast of Frankfurt, basically just south of the middle of the country. Why, you ask? It was my department's annual "industry field trip" and this year we were headed to the "solar management" company WAREMA.

What exactly do solar managers do? They manage the sun's rays, of course. And what does that mean ...? WAREMA designs and manufactures blinds, shutters, and awnings, as well as window treatments to protect against too much sun and even to ward off insects. This all sounds rather bland unless you've experienced German window technology -- and yes, it is both technology and an experience.

Let's look at blinds, shutters, and awnings. German blinds basically look like what you would see in the U.S., the only major difference being that they are more frequently operated by remote control than the typical American household blinds. Shutters, on the other hand, are not clap-shutters but rather heavy-duty blinds. They are operated via pulley or remote control, and resemble the rolling metal doors of garages or store entrances (when the store is closed). Awnings are far more common in Germany than in the U.S. and are also operated via remote control.

Rolladen: Germany's shutters, or heavy-duty blinds. (Imagine the snow.)

View of Rolladen from the outside.

Looking at the top Rolladen picture, you may notice the metal handles on the windows. I have been told that U.S. windows are "old-fashioned": do we really still open windows by sliding them up and down? What happens when they get stuck? Don't we want better ventilation? German windows have handles that operate in two directions: when the handle is vertical, the window opens from the top outward (usually a few inches); when the handle is horizontal, the entire window opens just like a door. There is one drawback, however: there are no screens. This may be fine in the winter, when opening the window for fresh air, but in the summer? Hello, mosquitoes! I joke with my roommates: they will never have to worry about mosquito bites -- the spiders take care of their share and the remaining mosquitoes take care of me! Actually, American screens wouldn't work well with German windows anyway. The screen would have to cover the entire length of the window and doing so would impact aesthetics, not to mention ventilation. (Business opportunity, anyone?)

After touring WAREMA's production facilities, which despite my lack of photos were actually quite fascinating, we returned to the bus and drove onto Würzburg, about 25 miles southeast of Marktheidenfeld. The big attraction in Würzburg, aside from the Main River, is the Marienberg Fortress. We stopped for an hour to explore the fortress grounds before continuing on our way to the local Biergarten for dinner. It was rainy gray day and everyone was in a rush, but I still took my time to get a few pictures.

The "refuge castle" as seen from the fortress.
If I ever return to Würzburg, I definitely want to tour the castle.

Würzburg from above, and from behind the flowers.

Würzburg, the Main River, and beyond.

Some of my work colleagues, thinking "Briana is still taking pictures??"
(Well yes, because where else do you see fairytale cottages like the one below?)

Cottage for the park service? Hobbit summer home? I simply don't know.

Soon it was time to board the bus again. I left the fortress grounds with a general impression of the area, but I would really like to return to wander around more and also tour the castle. I'll just have to add this medieval town to my growing list places to visit, or revisit, as the case may be.

Where does the next door lead?