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A Q&A With Ingenuity Intern Toshiyuki Bandai2 min read

by Julie Bobyock on August 4, 2022

Energy Geosciences Division Q and A

EESA’s new Ingenuity Internship program helps the next generation entering the geologic nuclear waste disposal workforce gain experience with research projects ranging from simulating contaminant migration in rocks to conducting clay experiments to study water movement in the subsurface.

After 2022 Ingenuity Intern Toshiyuki Bandai studied soil physics in his Bachelor’s and Master’s programs at the University of Tokyo in Japan, he was eager to learn even more about soil and apply his knowledge to other areas in environmental science. As a current Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Merced, he is continuing to study soil physics and has collaborated with EESA scientists to apply his background toward advancing effective underground nuclear waste storage.

What initially drew you to earth sciences specifically? 

When I was a kid, I was exposed to many environmental issues in the news, like air and groundwater pollution. Also, I liked insects. This triggered my passion for environmental science. 

Soil science is interesting to me, and it’s quite fundamental. Soil is everywhere. It relates to everything from climate change to civil engineering, and I think it’s a really fun subject.

Do you have any ideas for your future interests in science? 

This is my first experience involving nuclear waste storage. It’s a very practical application of soil physics, and it’s interesting how my knowledge of soil physics can be used in many different fields. There are so many things going on in the experiments EESA scientists are conducting, and it’s pushed me to learn more in new fields.

I want to pursue a research career, but I don’t think I’ll leave soil science. Soil science is necessary for many important subjects, such as climate change and nuclear waste storage. If we analyze the problems closely, we end up with the necessity to answer fundamental questions that have existed in our fields for a long time. For example, how are data in laboratory and field experiments different? How do we describe environmental processes with mathematical equations? How do we solve those equations in a computationally efficient manner?  These questions need fundamental knowledge in various fields, and there are so many things to learn. 

Has anything surprised you during your time in the Bay Area? 

My university is in Merced in the Central Valley, which is in the countryside, and I also used to live in Tokyo. Berkeley is quite different from these places. The campus is very beautiful, and it’s fun to live in a city like Berkeley during the summer. I think the weather is great – it rains a lot in Japan, but here it is very sunny, and I do a lot of camping and hiking with friends. We often go to Yosemite and have visited Redwoods National Park.

News & Events

Study Sheds Light on Microbial Communities in Earth’s Subsurface2 min read

August 16, 2023

  From the tops of tree canopies to the bottom of groundwater reservoirs, a vast amount of living organisms interact with nonliving components such as rock, water, and soil to shape this area of Earth known as the “critical zone.” Over half of Earth’s microbes are located in the subsurface critical zone, which ranges from…

Carl Steefel Honored in Goldschmidt Session on Reactive Transport2 min read

August 2, 2023

The contributions of Carl Steefel to the reactive transport modeling scientific community were recognized in a session held in his honor at the recent Goldschmidt 2023 conference (Lyon, France). Goldschmidt is the foremost annual, international conference on geochemistry and related subjects, organized by the European Association of Geochemistry and the Geochemical Society. The session was…

DOE Funds Projects to Advance Forest Carbon Dioxide Removal Efforts and Agricultural Soil Carbon Conservation4 min read

August 1, 2023

The DOE Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) and Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) recently announced $5 million in funding for four projects–two from Berkeley Lab with EESA leadership. The projects selected offer “promising solutions” to the nation’s climate change challenges by helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and will “accelerate their deployment…

Quantifying the strength of the land carbon sink3 min read

July 26, 2023

This article first appeared at nature.berkeley.edu/news. The world’s forests, grasslands, and other terrestrial ecosystems have played a substantial role in offsetting human carbon emissions—a capability that UC Berkeley researchers say would be threatened by continued global change. The assessment, published today as a new review paper in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, presents a comprehensive analysis of…

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