Lab visitors and activities in July-August 2024
by Leonardo Uieda | 2024/09/12
July and August were busy months for the CompGeoLab! We had India Uppal visiting from the end of June until this week, Santiago Soler also came for a visit in August for a few days, and me, India, and Gelson F. Souza-Junior went to Rio de Janeiro to work with our friends from the PINGA lab. We also finally took a group photo with everyone in it!
India’s visit to São Paulo
The first visitor we had in São Paulo, Brazil, was lab PhD candidate India Uppal from the University of Liverpool, UK. This was India’s first in Brazil and we hope it was the first of many to come! We worked primarily on India’s first paper about magnetic equivalent sources applied to Antarctic airborne data. India also gave a talk about her research to the Geodynamics Group at IAG/USP, which was very well received!
We are halfway to India’s first paper and we hope to get a preprint on EarthArXiv by the end of the year. This visit was funded by the Earth Sciences Research Group of the University of Liverpool and grant USP PRPI 22.1.09345.01.2. It was great to help the lab develop a deeper connection and friendships, which can be very challenging when many of them only interact through chat and the occasional video call.
Visit to the PINGA lab in Rio de Janeiro
At the end of July, we took a trip to Rio to work with our sister lab at the Observatório Nacional. Me, India, and Gelson did a bunch of things with PINGA lab heads Vanderlei C. Oliveira Jr. and Valéria C. F. Barbosa. India presented her work to them and got great feedback from two of the biggest experts in equivalent sources. We also started work on a new way to solve the Euler Deconvolution problem (more on this in the future). Sadly, we were so caught up in ideas and research that we forgot to take a picture…
Santiago’s visit to São Paulo
Finally, in August lab alumni and collaborator Santiago Soler, who is currently at the University of British Columbia, Canada, came to São Paulo for a quick visit. This was the first time me and Santiago met in person after 9 years working closely together (COVID foiled an attempt to meet up in 2020)! The lab had a great time learning from Santiago and teaching him how Brazilian food is way better than Argentinian food 😏. They also worked through a backlog of issues in our Python gravity and magnetics library Harmonica and made the v0.7.0 release of the package.
What comes next
These past two months were exhausting and inspiring in equal amounts. It was so good to the see the lab members getting along, working and having fun together! Building a team that can work together online is something I feel like we already do well through a mix of chat, regular video calls, and GitHub. But building friendships and closer working relationships takes a lot of time and effort to do online, which is where having the occasional in-person time really shines. If we’re lucky, we will be able to obtain funding to host workshops and similar events where we can get together and hack on something. I hope we can do this on a regular basis going forward!