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Rhiana Elizabeth Henry is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia, department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, within the Mineralogical Research Group led by Dr. Lee Groat. Her specialty is gemstone mineralogy. Her Ph.D research is on the crystal-chemistry of beryl. She uses single-crystal X-ray diffraction and chemical analyses to study the H2O content within the crystal structure of beryl, related to Na content, chemical differences between beryl varieties, and to create a predictive model of how the beryl structure changes with varied chemistry. This work can be used to help inform geological and gemological studies on beryl, find unique subtypes, and the modeling method can be extended to other minerals in the future. Rhiana completed her M.Sc. in Geologic Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2018 studying the crystallography of a Be-Fe-REE mineral gadolinite. She completed her Graduate Gemologist certification in 2018 at the Gemological Institute of America. She completed her two B.A. degrees in Physics and Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2013. She has been a teaching assistant for three different physics courses and four different geology courses. She is the mineral name checker for the journal Canadian Mineralogist, ensuring mineral names are properly described before publication. She is passionate about using gemstone mineralogy as a gateway for new students into geological science.

Goldschmidt is the foremost annual, international conference on geochemistry and related subjects, organised by the European Association of Geochemistry and the Geochemical Society. Researchers from the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences (EOAS) at UBC has been attending the Goldschmidt for many years. Here we inventoried the presentations authored by EOAS members at the Goldschmidt 2022.

If you attended the Goldschmidt 2022 but we missed you in the inventory, please let us know (For_EOAS_Web@eoas.ubc.ca).

Alice is an EOAS alumna, having obtained a BSc degree (Hon., First Class) when the department was called Geological Sciences, and a MSc degree when the department became Earth and Ocean Sciences. Her thesis projects involved the sedimentology and micropaleontology of diatomaceous marine sediments of Miocene age from southern California. She subsequently pursued a PhD at Carleton University (Ottawa), researching late Holocene diatomaceous marine sediments from Vancouver Island. This was followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Victoria, where she analyzed the geochemistry of late Quaternary marine sediments from along the western North American margin. Alice then managed analytical laboratories in the Faculty of Forestry at UBC before returning to EOAS, where she is currently a project manager at PCIGR.

The pandemic has caused significant impacts on fieldwork, which is essential to the research of many graduate students. Watch our interview with Frances Jones, MSc Student in Geological Sciences to learn how her original fieldwork plan was affected by COVID and how she overcame the challenges.

This resource (click here), developed by UBC SKYLIGHT: The Science Centre for Learning and Teaching, responds to commonly asked questions about how STEM faculty can ‘get started’ with ‘Indigenizing our curriculum’ (UBC ISP Goal #4) and creating safer classroom environments for Indigenous students. The responses to the questions are informed by conversations with Indigenous students, faculty, and staff in UBC Science, the CTLT Indigenous Initiatives team, and our colleagues in Skylight, and also include links to relevant UBC, BC, and Canadian resources and professional development opportunities.

This document and other EDI resources curated by the EOAS EDI committee can also be found here: https://www.eoas.ubc.ca/edi-and-safety/edi/resources

Lualawi Mareshet Admasu is a PhD student of Atmospheric Sciences working at University of British Columbia. Currently, he is investigating why the Arctic region warms faster than other parts of the world under global warming and its effects on weather systems. Most of his work involves analyzing climate data from model outputs and observations. He also runs climate models to study how weather systems behave in response to the rapid warming of the arctic using idealized experiments. Before coming to UBC, Lualawi did his undergrad in Civil Engineering at Addis Ababa Institute of Technology in Ethiopia and later obtained his master’s in water resources engineering at KU-Leuven in Belgium.