UCC Ph.D. Students Attend International Spring School in Kyoto, Japan.

18 Apr 2016

Two Ph.D. students from UCC, Karen Acheson (Physics Department /ERI), and Paul Buckley (Chemistry Department/ERI), recently participated in an International Spring School hosted by the Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies in Kyoto University.

The School was truly international with 18 other students attending from Indonesia, Vietnam, India Kazakhstan, Thailand, Tanzania, France, Belgium and Turkey.

The three week course comprised a mixture of lectures and discussion sessions on a wide range of topics in environmental science given by various professors from Kyoto and elsewhere.  There were visits to three leading research laboratories in Kyoto, including the Atmospheric Chemistry Research Laboratory directed by Prof Yoshizumi Kajii. Several excursions were also made to various sites around the country. The first of these visits was to a large waste water treatment plant at Lake Biwa, the largest lake in Japan. The second trip was to the southern island of Kyushu. Visits were made to a geothermal power plant and various sites which have experienced volcanic activity in recent history. The final field trip was to a marine research facility in Maizuru Bay. The Spring School was a hugely enjoyable experience, both from an educational and cultural perspective. It also provided a unique opportunity to meet other young environmental science researchers from around the world.

UCC has hosted students and researchers from Kyoto University in previous years and this programme should help establish greater links between the two universities. In fact, another student from Prof Kajii’s group will make a research visit to UCC in September 2016.