Around the world

Last June has been a tough but exciting month. Being an Early Stage Researcher in MSCA Project really gives you the possibility to travel around the world :) 

First stop Aalborg, Denmark. The last training week was waiting for us at Aalborg University.

Apart from the normal training lessons that we had, it was also time for our Mid-term Review. ITN project shall organise a Mid-Term Review (MTR) meeting in order to assess the fulfilment of all aspects (scientific, research training, management, etc.) which were defined in the beginning of the project. Therefore the Project Officer Szymon Sroda and the scientific expert Prof. Assoc. Elsa Caetano evaluated us from the scientific and non scientific point of view.

We were pretty stressed about that..but we nailed it  :)

And then it was time to fly to Japan :) 

 
My fellow PhD Joey and I participated in the ISOPE (International Society of Ocean and Polar Engineering) conference which was held in Sapporo (Hokkaido island).

ISOPE is a major conference in offshore engineering and every year is held in very nice locations. Just for your information, next year it will be in Hawaii :)

I was very excited to present a method that I am developing in my PhD to accurately predict the behaviour of soil under cyclic loading condition for offshore structures. The paper is titled "Explicit method to account for cyclic degradation of offshore wind turbine foundations using cyclic interaction diagrams". The work done in this paper was fruit of the research carried out during my secondment in COWI last year.

So far I learned that participating in a conferences enriches and challenges you in different aspects. The presentation is a very good exercise to transmit your research in a simple but clear way to the people attending the conference and hopefully someone will have some critiques during the discussion session which is the best way to improve your research. 

Another challenge is to be social and don't be shy to start to talk to people and to be curious about their jobs. It is very important for networking!

Conferences are not just about the scientific contents they are also a fun way to explore the country in which your are (culture, food, places etc).

Both Joey and I had the presentation on the first day of the conference which allowed us to be more calm for the rest of the conference.

When the conference was over there was finally time to explore Sapporo and Tokyo :) We did a lot of sightseing and tasted so much nice food (ramen is my favourite).
 

Enjoying Ramen

Gala Dinner

Sapporo Festival