Recipient of the 2009 Student Travel Award

 

The 2009 SANCOR Student Travel Grant was awarded to Natalie Burls from the Department of Oceanography at the University of Cape Town. She is currently in the third year of her PhD research and is investigating the Role of Ocean Dynamics in Tropical Atlantic Climate Variability.

 

Natalie attended the 9th International Conference on Southern Hemisphere Meteorology and Oceanography (ICSHMO) which took place from the 9th to the 13th of February 2009 in Melbourne Australia (http://www.bom.gov.au/events/9icshmo/). The 9th ICSHMO was hosted by the American Meteorological Society and the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society in Melbourne, Australia. The ICSHMO occurs every three years and is the largest conference dedicated to Southern Hemisphere studies. As advertised on the conference web page, the conference aims to bring the best scientists in weather, climate, water, ocean and polar science to Melbourne to present their latest work on a range of topics from earth system science to hydrological predictions to regional climate change studies, including unique Pacific based science research work.

 

Natalie says,"The conference was an ideal opportunity for me to showcase my work. I gave a poster presentation entitled "THE ROLE OF THE OCEAN IN THE TROPICAL ATLANTIC ZONAL MODE" which was well received by conference attendees and attracted several discussions with researches who have similarly been working on ocean energetics.

 

 

 I found this extremely beneficial as up until now I have had limited exposure to other scientist working on ocean energetics and I was able ask them several pertinent questions. I gained a great deal of insight and believe that the quality of my PhD research will greatly improved as a direct result of this visit. I found the presentations made by other conference attendees to be very informative. Presentations were given on a wide range of topics, exposing me to the different techniques presenters used to tackle their scientific problems. "

 

 

Natalie was also awarded the conference prize for best student poster presentation, a great honour considering that it was an international conference with a large student contingent.