A Snowy Trip to London

For the past 10 months or so, I've been volunteering some of my spare time as one of four convenors for this year's PETEX conference. We were responsible for setting the direction and themes of the programme and filling that programme with engaging keynotes, discussion panels and technical content.

The conference has historically been a large, oil & gas exploration and production-focused conference here in the UK, but one of my personal goals was to try to open this out to a wider audience by including contributions from outside of oil & gas. Achieving this was perhaps easier said than done as we encountered differing expectations and opinions. I am pleased that we brought speakers in from different industries, but I am under no illusion that there is more to do. If anyone has experiences to share in the space of influencing change and progress in similar settings, I'd love for you to reach out.

Our fantastic Day 2 panel members L-R: Ceylan Gomez (chair), Angela Bentley; Prof. Chris Jackson, Dr Alice Bunn, Andrew Hockey, Dr Aileen Doran

Despite some wet snow disrupting London transport, the event was a real success! It was cool to have a venue that looked a little different to the normal, often character-less hall, and we had great feedback on this and the exhibition space. I personally got so much from our day 2 keynote speakers (Professor Chris Jackson and Dr Steven Rogers) and the panel discussion on the same day (see photo above). These all looked at the familiar worry about the public perception of Geoscience and the lack of folks coming into the discipline. Discussions touched on how we communicate our science and how to do this more effectively, the perceptions of geoscience from those outwith our community (spoiler, it's a lot to do with diversity (or lack of), socio-economic barriers, "boring", "old-fashioned", "environmental damage" etc), how we start to change these perceptions and encourage young people to join our discipline. For anyone interested in this topic, I strongly encourage you to read Dr Steven Rogers' 2024 paper linked HERE to understand what people outside our geoscience bubble really think of our discipline.

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With my PhD Hat on

It was a great platform to present some of the first results from my PhD project. I am so pleased with how the presentation went and the feedback, interactions and networking it generated.

It's obviously always nice to get good feedback, but I think since starting my PhD, I have a new appreciation for this. When the majority of your work is self-motivated, solo and potentially lonely, it wouldn't be difficult to end up in a bit of a rut with it, or even just losing touch with the "outside world". So having peers feedback positively on your work is very reassuring!

I'm currently planning out the next phase of my project which will include some more participants taking part in the same exercise as I've presented already, but with some interesting tweaks. The aim is to firstly balance out the demographics across the study as a whole to give a representative sample but also include some additional elements. There may also be some field work on the cards too this year, taking me back to my geology roots with some more traditional mapping!