Talitha's blog

Application season

talitha.santini — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:20:00 GMT

It feels like I have been writing applications and proposals for two weeks straight now. Probably because I nearly have. Mostly applications for project funding, but also for exciting extras like training at a synchrotron and going to international conferences. Yes, you can laugh at me for getting excited about synchrotron training. It must be application season at the moment, that magical time of year when Santas of the funding world check their applicant lists and leave presents for some, and coal for others. At least having them all due around the same time allows for a little bit of cutting and pasting between applications...good weather for it at the moment too, nothing like a bit of rain to make you stay inside and ponder why your research is important to the university/community/environment/life as we know it. The most important one, my research proposal, is finally finished and handed in, so that’s a huge job off the to do list (I really do have a to do list on my desktop – and get pretty cranky when I get to the end of a day and can’t delete anything off it yet. Jorge Cham’s comic is a spookily accurate depiction of my desktop). Next on the list is an application for a Postgraduate Teaching Internship. I gave a lecture on research proposals to a third-year class earlier this year and no-one fell asleep, which was encouraging. I’ve also tutored privately since high school so it seems like a logical progression to try teaching at a university level. Anyway, it would be great to get some more experience and be involved in improving units.

Winter break

talitha.santini — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:23:00 GMT

Winter's always a nice time of year to be at uni. The weather outside actually makes you want to be inside, doing something productive, or drinking coffee and discussing ideas with people. Plus being able to park in student bays without a permit, go and get lunch at Broadway without huge crowds, talk to lecture-free supervisors about your project, and have free run of labs and libraries are all additional bonuses. Starting field work in a few weeks' time may be a little less enjoyable, but hopefully we can pick out the right days to tackle it.

Lab experiments at the moment are mainly focussed on simulating weathering, using pressure vessels to speed up attainment of chemical equilibrium, and Soxhlet extractors to simulate the effects of leaching at elevated temperatures which should also make things reach equilibrium a little more rapidly than in the field. A lot of work at the moment is also based around getting techniques right: optimising experimental setups, comparing analytical methods, figuring out how to get the most information out of the least number of samples and analyses. It can be pretty frustrating as it feels like you're not really getting anywhere - there's no numbers on a page or graphs to draw. But it is worth the time spent as it saves you repeating entire sets of analyses later on when you realise that, oh, great, X interferes with the measurement of Y, so all those analyses are invalid. Now that's frustrating.

I'm also working on editing an article (together with my supervisors) based on a third-year project looking at harnessing the activity of sulfate reducing bacteria for treating the acidity in acidic saline drainage waters from deep drains in the Wheatbelt. One reviewer's comments were positive, and the other's not so positive. But they did both agree that with revision, it would be suitable for publication, so I guess you've got to go with that and work on making it better. And at least we can be assured that it has been rigorously reviewed - it'll be a better article for it.

Friday drinks are attracting about 12-15 people now - numbers are going up week by week - and this Friday, the name of our 'pub' will be selected from the entries in the inventively-made entry box. This week will also see the commencement of the 'door prize', with one lucky winner receiving a free drink of their choice. The only thing cheaper than cheap beer is free beer! Journal Club will be on next Tuesday at 1, and this month's article (selected by Bree) is:

Carbon balance of terrestrial ecosystems in China. Shilong Piao, Jingyun Fang, Philippe Ciais, Philippe Peylin, Yao Huang, Stephen Sitch & Tao Wang. Nature, 458:1009-1014 (2009).

Real field work...and real lab work

talitha.santini — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 01:33:00 GMT

I've been a little lazy with blogging over the last month. Getting some real field work done, reviving the Social Club and even getting started on some experimental work have taken up a fair bit of time. I've done inductions for three residue deposit sites and been out to have a look at them. The images on Google Earth don't really do justice to the actual size of the residue deposit areas. Seeing them firsthand was great motivation to get moving on my experimental work. It's not that bauxite residue is particularly hazardous or anything like that; in fact, the more I work with it, the less harmful I think it is; and managed correctly, it's completely benign. It's more to do with minimising management costs and turning it into a resource rather than a burden. Or at least being able to do something productive with the land surface area that it occupies.

The first experiment that I ran didn't work at all, trying to get aluminosilicates to precipitate from suspensions of bauxite residue mud to which I had added a sodium metasilicate solution. The nice thing about scientific research is that nothing ever 'fails' as such; it just does or doesn't work, and you move on. An article emailed around by Andrew to the postgrads in our School on behalf of Martin Fey makes the point that "One of the beautiful things about sciences is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time.' Although I have no idea how people doing organic chemistry PhDs can spend three years trying different ways to synthesise a compound, only to conclude that well, none of the ways they tried will work... The second experiment has been far more promising and I'm quite excited to finish off the rest of the analyses (once I've finished my morning coffee and writing this post).

Finally - Social Club stuff. The first meeting of the revived Soil Science Journal Club was reasonably well attended, and we managed to persuade a few more people to join in with the offer of cupcakes. There should be a post on Andrew's blog soon about what was discussed. Bree's choosing the next article, and then Dan Murphy after that. Friday drinks (on a scale larger than three people who are still hanging around the building for some unknown reason at 5 pm on a Friday) are kicking off this week and will hopefully be well attended. Fundraising chocolates and soft drinks are also being revived, with raised funds going back into the Social Club to support events and perhaps even subsidising postgrads for writing retreats, organised by Lucy Leyland. Exciting times.

I'm now looking at the bottom of an empty coffee cup, which is telling me that either (a) I need more coffee; or (b) it's time to finish off analysing the samples from yesterday. Time to finish off the samples.

Photos from 'field work'

talitha.santini — Thu, 21 May 2009 02:01:00 GMT

Glasshouse mountains

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Exposed soil profile, Noosa National Park

Hell's Gate, Noosa National Park

Stef at the Big Pineapple

Field work

talitha.santini — Mon, 11 May 2009 04:59:00 GMT

Last week I had the opportunity to catch up with a few researchers in Brisbane who are also involved in bauxite residue mud research. It’s hard to know what to expect from people when you’ve only arranged to meet them over email, but they were all very friendly and more than happy to discuss different aspects of residue rehabilitation. Nerds of a feather stick together, or something like that I guess. Talking with them was valuable not only for getting some different perspectives on my research proposal and experimental approach, but also for finding out what areas are being researched right now (and what has been done recently but not yet published). Conversion of experiments to published papers can mean lag times of anywhere upwards of a year, so it was worthwhile talking to active researchers to shortcut the publication process.

Just for the record, I was actually on holiday in Brisbane, visiting my boyfriend Stefan. He’s undertaking two months of his PhD research into synthesising biodegradable scaffolds for tissue engineering with a polymer chemistry group at the University of Queensland. So I didn’t spend the whole trip nerding it up – we also went to Noosa for the long weekend, saw the Glasshouse Mountains, the Big Pineapple (not nearly as tacky as we’d hoped) and Ettamogah Pub, and caught up with a friend who’s moved from Kojonup to Toowoomba for work. Noosa and the Glasshouse Mountains did provide some examples of soil science in action though, and I couldn’t resist taking a few photos (attached).

One milestone down

talitha.santini — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 16:10:00 GMT

The seminar on Friday was reasonably well attended, especially by other postgrads which was a nice show of support, and is the first milestone down. Only two questions (both from the same person) which I thought was getting off very lightly compared to the stories I've heard from other universities, or even schools here at UWA. One post-doc recalled a school at her old uni requiring research proposals to be defended for up to an hour in front of a panel of seven or so academics. While it's nice to get some constructive criticism and different perspectives on your work, I think an arrangement like that might be taking it a little too far.

5pm drinks were also well attended, even though they were only organised during the afternoon by inviting people I saw during the afternoon or by people stopping in on their way out of the building once we'd got started. It's something Bree and I are working on making a weekly event, and hopefully will start to gather momentum from here onward. In fact, we're hoping that the social club activities in general will do the same - stay tuned. Next on the list is reviving Journal Club (like a book club, except with journal articles), which we'll start up as a lunchtime discussion. I'm thinking something on Martian soils might be a nice first article, because none of us will really know much about them, and it would make for good discussion on how we might apply traditional theories of soil development in a foreign environment. First meeting should be sometime after May 6, after I get back from a week's trip to Brisbane.

First post

talitha.santini — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 15:59:00 GMT

Seven weeks into my PhD, I've decided to start a blog, to (a) make it easy for friends and family to exactly what I do at uni all day, (b) create an 'online presence', which is apparently becoming increasingly important in academia, and (c) for the purely selfish purpose of having something to look back on when I finish. And possibly also somewhere to rant other than in my friends ears...

My PhD research aims to design a specific treatment to trigger and accelerate soil formation on bauxite residue mud. For anyone unfamiliar with bauxite residue mud (also known as 'red mud' - I remember my Year 12 Chem teacher calling it by this name), it's an alkaline, sodic waste slurry generated during the Bayer process. The Bayer process is the process by which alumina is extracted from bauxite (aluminium ore, of which Western Australia is a major global producer). Bauxite is crushed and then boiled in concentrated, hot sodium hydroxide solution (hence the alkalinity of the residue), dissolving aluminium hydroxide (which is turned into alumina), and leaving behind non-alkali soluble residue. The residue mainly consists of iron oxides, quartz, sodium aluminosilicate clays, and some aluminium (oxy)hydroxides.

With a pH of around 13 and a texture resembling pottery clay, plants aren't too keen on growing in the residue mud. My research will hopefully identify ways in which the residue can be encouraged to develop more desirable properties through triggering, accelerating, and steering the natural process of pedogenesis (soil formation) by way of imposed treatments such as nutrient addition or irrigation. This will remove the need for capping layers to be placed over residue mud deposits and will allow the reclaimed land area to be used for cropping, housing, or native vegetation reserves.

So that's the goal, I guess. The last seven weeks have been spent researching and preparing a research proposal and seminar, and attending to 'unfinished business' from my Honours project, which was conducted on a similar topic (in situ neutralisation of bauxite residue by cross-layer leaching)...and a manuscript based on my third year project which was on an unrelated topic (organic substrates in bioremediation of acidic saline drainage waters by sulfate-reducing bacteria). Despite the distractions of work from other projects, things seem to be moving along at a reasonable pace so far and I'm hoping to get into some field work within the next month.

For anyone interested in hearing more about my proposed study, I'll be presenting my research proposal seminar this Friday (April 24) at 1pm in the Webb Lecture Theatre (Geology and Geography building, G.21).