Aurora

Programs and Events
 

UBC MEd in Education for Sustainability

PART-TIME GRADUATE COHORT PROGRAM

MEd in Education for Sustainability (EFS2)

Engage in Real-World Sustainability Projects

Begins: August 2018
Delivery: Face-to-face, UBC & CityStudio Vancouver

Application Deadline: March 30, 2018

This innovative MEd cohort program will engage participants in real-world projects enmeshed in questions of learning and scholarship.

This partnership program features an Adaptive Education model, which builds a pedagogical bridge that ties the project and classroom to the community. Participants will consult on, experiment with, and co-create solutions that address problems which come to light in the course of working with the City of Vancouver on sustainability priorities.

The unique structure of this program includes a body of advisers and experts that support classroom-based research projects and instructors who act as research designers to facilitate group projects with real-world outcomes. Participants will:

• develop a critical awareness of the concepts of education and sustainability, how they relate, and their implications;
• demonstrate their learning throughout the program, thereby increasing their employability;
• build their abilities to work with governments and other partners by collaborating with city staff on sustainability policies;
• embody the knowledge and skills associated with community building, political engagement, social movement participation, real-world research, design, dialogue, network building, and knowledge dissemination.

 

VGC 2018 Newsletter - March 12th, 2018 - submit your Abstracts

The abstract submission deadline for the 3rd Virtual Geoscience Conference is this Thursday, March 15th. We are looking forward to reading your latest virtual-geoscience-themed abstracts. Submissions must be made using the online submission page.

Keynote Speakers Announced

We are excited to have four keynote speakers confirmed for VGC 2018:

1. Dr Nick Hedley, Director of the Spatial Interface Research Lab - a geovisual interface think tank - and a professor of geovisualization and spatial interface research in the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University, Canada.
2.  Dr Joseph Wartman, Director of Natural Hazards Reconnaissance Facility at the University of Washington, USA.
3.  Dr Regula Frauenfelder, Physical Geographer at the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute.
4.  Dr Helen Reeves, Science Director for Engineering Geology & Infrastructure at the British Geological Survey.

Short Course and Field Trip

We will be offering a short course on remote sensing applications to geohazards research and a local field trip exploring the local geology of the Kingston area on August 22nd, 2018. More details can be found on the VGC short course page. Participants can also register on the conference registration page.  

Sponsorship and Tradeshow Booths

We would like to thank BGC Engineering, Esri, the Geological Remote Sensing Group, and the VOG group for supporting VGC 2018. We would also like to thank GIM international and Remote Sensing journal for partnering with VGC.

We have a variety of sponsorship opportunities and trade show booth options still available. Please contact the organizing committee for more information: vgc2018@virtualoutcrop.com.

Learn more about the conference by visiting our website or follow us on twitter (@VirtualGeo_2018)

 

22nd Summer Course in 2K Climate Time Series Analysis, Bad Gandersheim, Germany, July 2-6 2018

This Summer Course in 2k Climate Time Series Analysis is devoted to better understanding the climate during the instrumental period and back over the past 2000 years. The course is specifically tailored to the needs of PhD students, postdocs and professional researchers in climatology, ecology, environmental sciences, geosciences, meteorology or hydrology. We assume a basic knowledge in calculus, the rest you will learn here. You get the required statistical tools and extensive hands-on training to become able to optimally analyse your data and answer the associated questions about the climate. You acquire the theoretical basis for understanding the tools and interpreting the results. You learn to quantify the various sources of uncertainty in data, climate models and statistical estimation.

Climate case studies serve to illustrate the usefulness of the tools: how to make the most of your data by means of statistics—and how to publish it in a thesis or a research paper. Examples include:

• The suspected hiatus in global warming after the year 1998
• Change-point analyses of modelled river runoff for the instrumental period
• Extreme river floods during the past decades and centuries
• Hurricane risk during the past millennium

The course instructor, Dr. Manfred Mudelsee, trained in physics, geology and statistics, has a long-standing expertise in teaching statistical methods to non-specialists. This is the 22nd course given by him.

Registration deadline is June 22, 2018.  For more information and how to register, please see here.

 

Employment Opportunities

 

Assistant/Associate/Professor - Department of Physics and Space Science, Royal Military College of Canada, Ontario

The Department of Physics and Space Science at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario, invites applications for tenure-track positions at the level of Assistant Professor (UT-02), Associate Professor (UT-03), or Professor (UT-04) in the fields of Acoustics and Oceanography or Materials Science.

The Royal Military College is a bilingual university offering undergraduate and graduate programs in the humanities, sciences and engineering to members of the Canadian Forces and civilians. Members of the Department of Physics and Space Science are involved in a wide range of research in the fields of: Acoustics and Oceanography (numerical modelling of oceans and lakes, remote sensing of arctic waters), Materials Science (optical materials and photonics, high-energy laser/matter interactions, non-destructive evaluation), and Space Science (astronomy and astrophysics, ionospheric physics and space weather, nanosatellite payload and mission design, remote sensing, surveillance of space).

The Department of Physics and Space Science offers B.Sc. degrees in Physics and in Space Science, as well as M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in physics with specializations in Acoustics and Oceanography, Materials Science and Space Science. The typical teaching load of an indeterminate faculty member is comprised of four undergraduate or graduate lecture courses, plus one undergraduate laboratory, per annum. In addition to teaching graduate and senior undergraduate courses in their area of expertise, faculty members of the department may be expected to teach any junior undergraduate courses in the program, in the language(s) of their position.

For more information and how to apply, please see here.