Hello, I am Andreia and I am mother of three (2 boys and the SEAMSTRESS project).
The project started in April 2019. Since the start, the main focus has been the recruitment of the team members and coordination of the experiments planned for the summer and spring 2019. Recruitment started late January and finished in August.
While I started maternity leave on the 8th of July the project has continued its flow thanks to an enthusiastic team. I still owe a proper SEAMSTRESS kick-off meeting. Nevertheless, we had our first project meeting on the 18th of September. The meeting was to gather the core of the team based in Tromsø to introduce each others work. We met at the Sami house of the campus, Árdna, and had a cozy afternoon, in that magical place, with informal discussions.
The core of the team consists of (you find our profiles at https://cage.uit.no/about-us/people/):
2-PhD fellows, Frances Cooke and Przemyslaw Domel
2-Post-doctoral fellows, Rémi Vachon and Hariharan Ramachandran
1-Research assistance, Sunny Singhroha
2-Short term collaborators, Stefan Beaussier and Jean Baptiste Koehl
And myself, Andreia Plaza-Faverola as principal investigator.
Each of us had a brief presentation with the status of the work conducted so far, consisting of both modeling and experimental tasks.
In addition, we were lucky to have two of our project advisors to join the meeting. Vera Schlindwein (AWI), advisor on the seismological part of the project, was in Tromsø getting ready to sail on R/V Polarstern for an Arctic expedition (https://www.mosaic-expedition.org/expedition/polarstern/). Professor Stefan Bünz (CAGE-UiT) was getting ready to leave for another expedition to the same area but on board R/V Kronprins Haakon (https://haconfrinatek.com/).
Sunil Vadakkepuliyambatta and Kate Waghorn, colleagues from the gas hydrate and free gas reservoir group in Cage also participated.
For me it was important to meet them all together and to emphasize how exciting it will be to interact and integrate results from the modeling and the experimental parts of the project. It was particularly interesting to see the different angles from which each team member approaches the scientific questions of the project.
Text: Andreia Plaza-Faverola
Picture: Rodolfo Plaza (my father helped me by being a nany for my 2 months old during the meeting)