IRTG Travel Grants Programme

PhD candidate Lars Aue was supported for his research stay in Helsinki at the FMI

As part of my PhD project within (AC)³, I am cooperating with two scientists from Finland, who are working at the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) and the University of Helsinki. However, due to the large distance between Germany and Finland and the corona related cancellation of most of the scientific meetings in the last two years, we only met in zoom meetings to discuss our joined research for a long time. With the help of the IRTG travel grant, I was eventually able to visit our cooperation partners last winter in Helsinki.

I spend four weeks in Helsinki and had a work place at the FMI during that time. That way I could do my regular work and at the same time meet our cooperation partners and colleagues from their working groups. Having started my PhD during corona lockdown and spending a lot of time in home office, that was a great opportunity for me to exchange with scientists from outside my own working group and to build up some new contacts.

The possibility to discuss my scientific results intensively with our cooperation partners – without always having to schedule a zoom meeting first – was very beneficial for my PhD project. I was able to make a lot of progress during my research stay and also started to work on a first draft for a joined publication, which is submitted by now. I also made use of the research stay to promote my work within (AC)³ to the scientists working at my host institutes, for example during a seminar talk.

Apart from all of that, it was very nice to explore Helsinki and its environment, watch the aurora during a trip to Lapland and also see some real life sea ice, which is the main subject of my PhD thesis and which I have so far only studied on the computer monitor.

A joined paper with scientists from the Finnish Meteorological Institute and the University of Helsinki came out of the research stay, which can be found here.

A list of all funded travel grants can be found on the IRTG page here.