Amount Awarded: $25,000
ACDC, a summer course in climate dynamics initiated by UiB in 2009, is an annual two-week event where leading international scientists gather together with talented PhD students and postdocs to learn and begin research projects on a particular interdisciplinary problem. The geographical location of the school is often a remote locality that relates to the overarching theme of the summer school. The major advantages of holding the school in a remote place are that students and lecturers get ample opportunities to mingle, and that all participants are immersed in the material at hand leading to breakthroughs in research and building long-lasting collaborations. The school creates strong, lasting bonds between students through a unique shared learning experience, which fosters future research collaborations.
ACDC brings together climate science students with theoretical, modeling, and observational backgrounds. This is reflected in the program of the summer school with lectures that address all three broad categories of climate science, and a fieldwork component of the course. Two or three days of each summer school is allocated to this fieldwork that introduces the students (and lecturers) to hands-on sampling and analysis. The next two summer schools will be held at the Institute Pascale in France (2026) and the Finse research station in Norway (2027). Our project aims to provide funding for UC Berkeley graduate students to attend these summer schools over the next two years, and to support the PIs (Vargas Zeppetello and Nisancioglu) in our planning meetings as we endeavor to make ACDC a long-term contributor to global scientific education on climate. Note that ACDC is a credit-awarding course for Norwegian and American students.