About Diana Dalbotten

Diana Dalbotten is the Director of Diversity and Broader Impacts for the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics and the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, University of Minnesota; and for the Geoscience Alliance, a national alliance for broadening participation of Native Americans in the Geosciences.

2021 Communication and Team Facilitation Intern Yusuf Khairulhuda creates a 2021 All-Team Story Map

Yusuf Khairulhuda, a University of Minnesota student majoring in Product Design/User Experience was an IonE Sustainability Intern for the 2021 REU on Sustainable Land and Water Resources. Besides his work providing our participants with a great experience this summer, Yusuf created this story map about the REU SLAWR 2021.

REU SLAWR 2021 created by Yusuf Khairulhuda

Yusuf giving kudos to Michelle and Jackie on their poster at the All-Team Symposium.

Chris in the Lab

Chris is creating an vacuum chamber for working with oxygen sensitive materials. In reality, he’s holding a Kleenex box. The chamber uses nitrogen to ensure there’s no oxygen in the chamber. Team Stream – manoomin – toured Cara Santelli’s lab in Snyder Hall at the Univ. of Minnesota. Snyder is where Team Stream prepared geo chemistry materials for their first field day on June, 14th 2021.

Find Paid Summer Research!

PathwaysToScience.org

Paid Summer Research Programs!

Most programs offer both a stipend and housing and travel support. Programs range across all STEM disciplines and all areas of the country! Deadlines are coming right up for most programs!

Postdoc and Graduate Student Opportunity

These postdoc and graduate student opportunities might be of interest. The postdoc position has a very flexible start date, and the candidate does not need to check all these boxes. It’s our “wish” list. 😊

Regards,

Morteza Karimzadeh, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Geography
Affiliate Assistant Professor, Computer Science, Information Science
University of Colorado Boulder
Traditional Territories of the Arapaho, Cheyenne and Ute Nations

Transdisciplinary Postdoctoral Research Associate Position in Spatial Data Science and Geoscience

University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO

Starting date (very flexible): 1/7/2021

Application review begins December 7, 2020 on a rolling basis until the position is filled.

We invite applications for a postdoctoral research associate position at the Department of Geography, University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder), with a flexible starting date of 1/7/2021 and possibility for remote work, although the ability to work on the CU Boulder campus in the long term is desirable. The initial offer is for 12 months, with potential for renewal contingent upon favorable progress.

The postdoctoral scholar will primarily work on a recently funded NSF EarthCube project (Data Capabilities: Enabling Analysis of Heterogeneous, Multi-source Cryospheric Data, Award# 2026962) under the supervision of principal investigator, Dr. Morteza Karimzadeh. The project is focused on creating software systems and cyber-infrastructure for harmonizing heterogeneous big data products (including satellite imagery and in situ observations) in a cloud environment for various downstream tasks. The technologies developed are expected to be extendable to a variety of applications, but for this project, the focus will be on classification and mapping of sea ice.

Sea ice is an important component of the climate system and a key indicator of climate change. Sea ice is spatiotemporally dynamic, exhibiting a variety of evolving ice types that need classification for scientific analysis or operational planning. The mapping of sea ice at high spatial and temporal resolutions remains a scientific challenge. With the increasing availability of high-resolution remote sensing products such as SAR and lidar, there is a renewed desire for tackling this challenge. However, bridging data science and geoscience is key in successfully harnessing these large heterogeneous data for sea ice mapping.

The postdoctoral position will be homed in the Geography Department at CU Boulder and will actively collaborate with the co-PIs, scientists and students in the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and CU Denver’s Department of Computer Science.

The postdoc duties will include:

Design and implement software and computational modules in collaboration with the team’s sea ice scientists, remote sensing experts, and spatial data scientists.
Draft and lead scholarly publications and reports.
Assist the PI with leading research activities within the group and project management.
Assist the PI with user evaluations and stakeholder engagement at NSIDC, NOAA, NCAR, the U.S. National Ice Center (NIC) and the Canadian Ice Service (CIS).
Assist in supervising graduate and undergraduate students in the team.
Assist in drafting successful research grant proposals.
Interface with other research groups at and beyond the NSF EarthCube community and the University of Colorado.
Work with research assistants to prepare training and outreach material, including easy-to-use Jupyter notebooks for product adoption.
Given the transdisciplinary nature of this postdoctoral position, we expect that the candidate has foundation in either one or both spatial data science and/or geosciences, with the position strengthening the postdoc’s expertise in both disciplines.

The qualified candidate will possess a majority of the following, with interest in developing the rest:

A Ph.D. in geography, geoscience, computer science, information science, statistics, or a cognate field is mandatory.
Research background and expertise in applied machine learning and particularly, deep learning.
Background and experience working with, spatial data, geographic information systems and earth observations.
Familiarity with passive and active microwave imagery, airborne and spaceborne lidar altimetry is desirable (examples include SAR imagery from Sentinel-1, lidar altimetry data from Operation IceBridge, ICESat and ICESat-2, and radar altimetry data from CryoSat-2).
Programming skills in Python, Scikit-learn and deep learning libraries (TensorFlow, or Keras or PyTorch). Working ability with R and its spatial packages is a plus.
Interest or background in visual analytics for interactive machine learning is desirable.
Experience working with cloud storage and compute instances is desirable.
Experience in working with the output of climate models is desirable.
Front-end development and visualization skills using D3.js, leaflet.js and the React framework is desirable.
Excellent oral and written communication skills.

Both beginning and senior postdoctoral candidates are encouraged to apply. To apply, please upload your CV, a research statement (no more than one page) and the contact information of references to the application portal:

https://jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDetail/Postdoctoral-Associate/27487

Please direct your questions to Dr. Morteza Karimzadeh (karimzadeh@colorado.edu). Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis starting December 7, 2020 until the position is filled.

MS/PhD positions

Funded MSc/PhD positions are available in Dr. Morteza Karimzadeh’s research group at the Department of Geography, University of Colorado Boulder, starting Fall 2021. The application deadline is December 1, 2020. The positions are supported through TA and RA appointments.

The successful candidates will join a vibrant and growing team of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. Our current spatial data science projects intersect with geovisual analytics, GeoAI and spatial statistics in a variety of domains including sea ice mapping and cryospheric data fusion, quantitative analysis of human mobility, geo-text analysis of various organizational and archival textual sources, and modeling spatial connectivity and dependence.

Details about the program can be found here. Please also note that we have a graduate application fee waiver for under-represented minority applicants and applicants with financial need.

For inquiries, please feel free to contact karimzadeh@colorado.edu with your CV, explaining how your research expertise or interests may align with the team, and what potential areas you’d be interested in working on in the future.

REU SLAWR Featured in GSA Today!

Check out this article about the REU, which was written by Emily Geraghty Ward, myself, Nievita Bueno Watts and Antony Berthelote.

GSA TODAY

 

https://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/groundwork/G366GW/article.htm

Field trip to UMD!

We had a field trip up to UMD today.  I was going to say great, but despite the great company there was the steady drizzle and the dense fog and the 40 degree temps!

Great to meet up with Nate Johnson and Sophie and see where Team Zaaga’igan will live this summer.

Here’s some pics:

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Gabriela making the robotic fish swim at SAFL

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No really, we’re not cold…the lighthouse on Lake Superior.

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Eating burritos at that Russian place with Nate and Sophie.

Apply to the REU SLAWR 2015 Summer Program

Students are invited to apply to the REU on Sustainable Land and Water Resources, which introduces undergraduate students from 2-year and 4-year colleges and universities to the key elements of research on land and water resources that are essential to improving management practices, with a focus on Community-Based Participatory Research and diverse interdisciplinary research teams. Students are advised by a multi-institutional and multidisciplinary team of researchers associated with the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (Flathead Reservation, Montana) (CSKT), the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa (FDL), Salish Kootenai College (SKC), the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics (NCED), St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, University of Minnesota (UMN), and the National Lacustrine Core Facility (LacCore), Limnological Research Center, UMN. It is anticipated that additional researchers from UMN and other institutions will be recruited as new projects are defined.
Participants are involved in ongoing and new community-defined projects that integrate Earth-surface dynamics, geology, civil engineering, ecology, biology, limnology, paleolimnology, and hydrology principles and techniques required for sustainable land and water management and restoration while using an interdisciplinary team-oriented approach that merges scientific and indigenous research methodologies. Students from 2- and 4-year institutions are encouraged to discover the entire range of academic and career options from management practitioner to Ph.D.-level researcher, and how these career possibilities relate to students’ personal, academic, and career goals. In partnership with two tribal reservations, we also introduce students to land and water management challenges and career opportunities on tribal reservations. Native American students are specifically invited to apply to this REU, but the REU teams continues to be diverse in ethnicity, age, life experience, regionality, and science discipline. The REU provides a CBPR research experience in multidisciplinary environmental protection that is both engaging and challenging. Key elements that promote these outcomes are: 1) a unique mentoring approach that fosters the “whole student,” with individual attention to academic, social, cultural, personal and financial circumstances; 2) a combination of experimental, field, and computational methods; 3) close interaction with faculty who are leaders in their field on cutting-edge research projects; 4) embedding student research within active ongoing research projects at a major research institution and in CBPR on tribal reservations; and 5) the intrinsic appeal of contributing to research on subjects of obvious local and national relevance in the stunning natural settings of Montana and northern Minnesota. Each part of the REU, from orientation, to carrying out the project, to the All-Team gathering in Minneapolis at the end of the program, is carefully designed to maximize the participants’ experience.

Orientation

Welcome to all the participants and mentors in the REU on Sustainable Land and Water Resources!

Today was an excellent day on the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa reservation.  All the students gathered from Team Stream and Team Zaaga’igan and traveled ‘up north’.  Reggie DeFoe gave us a wonderful tour of the FDL Resource Management building.  The highlight of the day was a great talk around the campfire as we roasted sausages and cooked fajitas in foil packs.

It is so exciting to start a new summer!

Final Day of REU

Today the teams presented our poster projects to a variety of scholars. We gave groups the run down about eight different times and were asked some very engaging question by some participants. After all the work that was put into collecting our data I am happy to see that our results allow us to reconstruct a very interesting history of our peatland and we are able to make some valuable conclusions.
However the presentations were the easy part today, where the true task came in was saying peace out to members of the team. Diana made our internship a very pleasant one while Emi helped evolve our writing styles and prepare us for scientific writing. Wayne always brought cheer and kindness to the table and carried many heavy items through the bog that god knows would’ve sunk me. Zach kept us moving while Adrienne made us laugh. Phil offered a friendly approach to mentoring  that allowed us to create a great connection with him while simultaneously learning more than we ever expected to, when Phil was there you knew it would be a good day. And Christa was our teacher, without her our research would’ve become stagnant as the interns ran around in circles of confusion. She was our ride to the grocery store and our friend to watch horror movies with. She taught me most of what I learned this summer and I am confident she will have profound influence on more students throughout her career. Peace out team Zagaa’igan, I have to get back to North Carolina now.
 
Alec Keiper

8/14/13

Today the Montana and Minnesota team met early in the morning at Lind Hall and discussed deep and meaningful topics about life. The questions asked were: 1) What is cultural? 2) How is culture and science related? 3) What have we learned about our self and science? Everyone had really interesting and different things to say. Today made me realize how much I really like the mind of fellow scientists and people interested in science. They are unique individuals that see the world differently than the average person. After our discussion we went to THE MALL OF AMERICA. I typed that really big because it’s THE MALL OF AMERICA.  That mall is ridiculously big. I was really overwhelmed, confused, and tired after 2 hrs. I went back to the hotel after and took a nap.

Adrienne Warmsley

Scavenger Hunt

            Today we walked around the riverfront area of Minneapolis as we partook in a scavenger hunt. After nine weeks apart, our sister team from Montana finally met today in person for the first time as we took a tour of the St. Anthony’s Falls Laboratory on the Mississippi River. This was a great way to learn the city in a fun and interactive way. As the days count down in our REU, I look forward to enjoying our last days together.

 

Zachary Kisfalusi

8/8/2013

Today was another work day. Students started the day in Pillsbury hall at 9:00 A.M. We continued our work from yesterday in creating a poster to present on our last day, next Friday. We continued to make good progress and it seems we will be putting the finishing touches on it tomorrow. When finished, students and mentors went to dinner at Hell’s Kitchen to enjoy some delicious food and quality time.

Wayne Greensky

8/9/2013

Yesterday, for the entire day, the team was preparing our poster for our presentation. I was in charge of the formatting so everyone sent me all their photos and results and what section they were writing then I had to decide how to fit them on properly. All day long I sat at a computer dragging squares around on a bigger square to decide how appealing the certain squares look in certain locations and at certain sizes. Then we had a computer malfunction and I had to redo all the photos on the poster. However it ended up a polished product and it should be completely ready for presentation. It is indeed a good summary of what we have been doing in Minnesota all summer.

Alec Keiper

8/7/2013

Today was another busy day spent working on our poster.  There is a lot of work to do within the next two days, but I am confident that the team will get it done. We also met with Emi today and went over our interpretation section of the paper. The project is beginning to wind down, and I can tell people are excited to wrap it up.  

Adrienne Warmsley

8/2/2013

Today Christa took Adrienne, Zach and I to the North Shore of Lake Superior a little north of Duluth. There we skipped stones over the lake and stacked other stones atop boulders. The tidal pools were of great interest to me but Christa seemed to prefer foraging random flowers  from the nearby tree line, such as Forget-Me-Nots.
Then we were taken to the Duluth grill for lunch, an apparently all local food restaurant. I ordered an orange smoothie, french fries with homemade ketchup and the Ratatouille. This was by far the best meal I have eaten since being in Minnesota and now I insist that I learn how to cook my own ratatouille. Although the food twas pricey, twas worth it by far.
 
Alec Keiper

8/1/2013

                Today (July 31st) students started the day early at 7:45 A.M to go over the finishing touches on our Power Point presentation and also to have one last chance to practice our parts before presenting to the tribal council at 9:00 A.M. The meeting itself was a success. Students presented their points concisely and didn’t feel they left out any relevant information. Afterward students met with Emi individually to discuss the final section of the paper due on Sunday, the discussion. Emi gave her feedback on previous papers and after concluding the meetings students were generously taken out by Diana for lunch. Upon returning at 3:00 PM students had one final presentation to give to the teaching convention during the science fair meeting. Students also listened to presentations given by two high school students on their participation in different competitions last year.

Wayne Greensky

A False Positive

I perhaps became a little too ambitious, overexcited, and rushed with PCR after I figured out the process. Yesterday, I attempted to both extract DNA samples from 11 snails, and run a PCR on all of them. Though that may not sound time consuming, the DNA extraction took at least two hours, DNA quantitation 30 minutes, the PCR prep took another few hours, and the little 0.2mL tubes had to cook overnight for the reaction to work. Today, when I went in, I ran 3 gels and found that all my negative snails had supposedly “positive” results. Instead of one solid band between the 300 and 400 base pair markers, I noticed a double band in almost each snail DNA sample. I had not originally made a negative control, where I excluded template DNA. When I made the negative control later, I found that one of the PCR chemicals had been contaminated. What should have shown up as  a blank space on the gel had the same double banded pattern in the same location.

 

7/31/2013

Today was a busy day starting early in the morning with a presentation for the Tribal Council. Although some of us (me) were a little nervous I think our effort and interest to inform the Fond Du Lac reservation about the project showed. I am very happy to be a little piece of the big puzzle on how anthropogenic activities affect ecosystems and natural resources.

After the presentation we met with Emi to go over our results, and start preparing for the interpretation. Later, Diana took us to Black Bear Casino to eat lunch at the buffet. We presented again for the CYCLES teachers meeting at the Cloquet Forestry Center. We even got a chance to see what other students are doing. I think it is wonderful to see other young people that are just as interested in science. 

Adrienne Warmsley

mountain goat

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Team SPAW on a team building trip to Glacier National Park. We saw a mountain goat at Logan Pass in Glacier National Park. The goat in the picture was down about three hundred feet in the valley to the north of the steps two hours before this picture was taken.

Avalanche Creek

Team SPAW on a team building trip to Glacier National Park. The Cedars Nature Trail is located at Avalanche Creek pull out.  I think the Avalanche Creek falls is one of easiest falls to get to in the park. I try to get to the park every year and walk this trail to see Avalanche Creek falls.Image

bear spray

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A bear spray deployment training with Tony in background at the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Natural Resources Department Office on 6/12/2013. I was not having a good day it was cold and my arm was hurting.