Source: Lisa Kelly, Dan Hawkes
The American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting is the largest worldwide conference in the geophysical sciences, attracting nearly 20,000 Earth and space scientists, educators, students, and policy makers. This meeting showcases current scientific theory focused on discoveries that will benefit humanity and ensure a sustainable future for our planet.
LBNL’s Earth Sciences Division (ESD) will have a strong presence at this year’s AGU Fall Meeting, starting next week in San Francisco (December 5–9, 2011) at Moscone Center. In addition to the various ESD-affiliated speakers, ESD will be hosting a booth this year, conveniently located at the end of a row, against a wall, and (strategically!) near a food stand (Booth #1263).
More than 150 openings at LBNL: Susan McAllister of LBNL Human Resources will be on hand to meet with people pursuing work in the Earth sciences. Get a head start on your job search by browsing our current openings >>
Meet the Scientists: Tuesday through Friday, ESD scientists will be available at the ESD booth for in-person conversations about what they are working on currently, what they anticipate working on in the future, how science is moving forward to solve some of the challenging problems of these times, and what they see for the future of research, education and training. You can browse the lineup below:
Tuesday, 12/6, 1:30 p.m.: Michael Commer
Dr. Michael Commer is a Career Geological Research Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Earth Sciences Division. His interests include large-scale, multidimensional, inverse and forward modeling problems arising in exploration and environmental geophysics, numerical methods on distributed computing platforms, accelerated hardware computing, and electromagnetic geophysics. He has over 10 years of experience in numerical programming, geophysical (joint) imaging and modeling methods.
Tuesday 12/6, 2:35 p.m.: Jens Birkholzer
Jens T. Birkholzer is a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he currently leads the Nuclear Energy & Waste Program. Jens received his Ph.D. in water resources, hydrology, and soil science from Aachen University of Technology in Germany in 1994. Jens’ area of expertise is subsurface hydrology with emphasis on coupled fluid, gas, solute and heat transport in complex subsurface systems.
Wednesday 12/7, 10:10 a.m.: Jeff Chambers
Jeff Chambers is a Staff Scientist in the Climate Sciences Department at LBNL, and also a faculty member at the National Institute of Amazon Research (Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas em Amazônia – INPA) in Brazil. His research is focused on forest disturbance ecology, land-atmosphere interactions, tree ecophysiology, and global change biology. This work involves a variety of measurements made on individual trees in tropical and temperate forests, remote sensing image analysis, and simulation modeling. Results from this work demonstrate that wind disturbances (e.g. hurricanes, blowdowns in the Amazon) have important effects on landscape carbon balance and tree species community composition. A key research activity at LBNL is focused on improving the treatment of ecosystem disturbance and tree mortality (both natural and anthropogenic) in Earth system models.
Wednesday 12/7, 12:20 p.m.: Susan Hubbard
Susan S. Hubbard is a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she leads the Environmental Remediation and Water Resources Program and the Sustainable Systems SFA.
Susan’s research focuses on advancing the use of geophysical methods for shallow subsurface characterization and monitoring and the use of integrated datasets to investigate environmental problems. She edited the first book on hydrogeophysics.
Wednesday 12/7, 1:30 p.m.: Ernie Majer
Ernie Majer has had a distinguished career as an energy geophysicist at LBNL. While a graduate student in geophysics at U.C. Berkeley, he came to work at LBNL in the late 1970s and early 1980s to do seismic wave analyses for field studies in geothermal and petroleum regions. As part of seismological explorations in Nevada and Northern California, he tested exploration instruments and data processing/interpretation techniques for locating and assessing potential geothermal and petroleum sources. This work led to characterizing acoustic emissions and microseismic activity associated with geothermal and petroleum reservoir management, the underground storage of nuclear waste (thermal and radiation effects), determining the path of hydrofractures associated with stimulation and stress measurement activities, and tracking fluid injection fronts.
Wednesday 12/7, 2:30 p.m.: Curtis Oldenburg
Curtis Oldenburg is a Staff Scientist and Program Lead for the Geologic Carbon Sequestration Program, and Editor in Chief of Greenhouse Gases: Science and Technology. Curt Oldenburg received his PhD in geology from U.C. Santa Barbara in 1989, and has been working at LBNL since 1990. His area of expertise is numerical model development and applications for coupled subsurface flow and transport processes. He has worked in geothermal reservoir modeling, vadose zone hydrology, and contaminant hydrology. For the last ten years, Curt Oldenburg has worked in two main areas of geologic carbon sequestration, (1) CO2 injection for enhanced gas recovery, and (2) near-surface leakage and seepage processes, monitoring, detection, and impacts including risk-based frameworks for site selection and certification.
Thursday 12/8, 10:10 a.m.: Bill Collins
William (Bill) Collins’ research is focused on the changes in the energy balance of the Earth system and the implications of those changes for the future of our climate. He trained in physics and astrophysics at Princeton University and the University of Chicago.
Thursday 12/8, 11:20 a.m.: Yuxin Wu
Yuxin Wu is currently a geological research scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where his research is focused on the investigation of geophysical methods, primarily complex resistivity or spectral induced polarization, for the characterization and monitoring of hydrological and biogeochemical perturbations in the subsurface.
Wu’s current research topics include spectral electrical responses from mineral precipitation during remediation processes; investigation of geophysical imaging method for the monitoring of transformations during microbial enhanced hydrocarbon recovery under high pressure and monitoring of fracture emplacement and amendment delivery in both saturated and unsaturated zones. Dr. Wu is also interested in the monitoring of the fate and transport of engineered nano and micron particles, particularly Fe0, in the subsurface with geophysical methods.
Thursday 12/8, 1: 30 p.m.: H.H. Liu
H.H. Liu is a staff scientist and currently serves as the head of Hydrogeology Department. He received his Ph.D. degree in soil physics (vadose zone hydrology) from Auburn University in 1995 and joined LBNL in 1997 as a geological scientist. His research interests include fracture hydrology, coupled hydrological and mechanical processes, vadose zone flow and transport, and their applications in geothermal energy, nuclear waste management and CO2 geological sequestration.