Professor Uwe Brand and Brock University will host and mentor “Early Stage Researchers” under the EU’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation – Horizon 2020 initiative.

A Brock University scientist is a member of a group of 20 researchers from 11 countries that has received a large European Union (EU) grant to train PhD students in the latest, innovative geoscience technologies.

Earth Sciences Professor Uwe Brand and Brock University will host and mentor “Early Stage Researchers” under the EU’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation – Horizon 2020 initiative.

The program, financed by the “Base-Line Earth” EU grant of more than 3.7 million Euros (approximately CAD 5.19 million), will enable 15 PhD students from all countries of the world to be based at one of the 15 European host universities, with opportunities to conduct research and fieldwork at other institutions and interact with all researchers within the group.

Countries involved in the project include researchers from Canada, Australia, Germany, Poland, Denmark, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Israel, France and Italy.

“The major objective is to train people for the 22nd century,” says Brand, “so that they’re not only experts in geochemistry, for instance, but also in stratigraphy, paleobiology and other areas such as state-of-the-art instrumentation.

“We hope to give these students a head start over traditional PhDs, (so) that they will have much broader and better skills so that they could become leaders in geoscience,” says Brand.

Brand says the group plans to put out a call for potential candidates this January, with the committee selecting candidates approximately six months later.

Successful candidates will have three years to complete their PhDs, with the full support of the 20 researchers and many others in the field through annual meetings, presentations at international conferences and other activities.

Brand says an added bonus is that one of the partners in the project is a high tech, world leader company called Thermo Fisher Scientific, which will contribute access to state-of-the-art equipment for research.

“They (the students) can work on the latest instrument. They’ll get trained on stuff that is coming hot off the press.

“The Early Stage Researchers will conduct everything from laboratory to field experiments using brachiopods from modern to ancient habitats. They will use state-of-the-art micro-analytical tools to unravel mysteries related to the evolution of the oceans, ecosystem adaptation to climate change, oceanic trace metal cycling and submarine energy resources.”

The PhD students will be exposed to multi- and interdisciplinary research environments at academic, non-academic and high tech institutions linking biogeochemical research and training in marine biology, marine ecology and geochemistry with chemical analytics, engineering and cutting edge instrumentation.

Brand is a carbonate isotope geochemist whose expertise is in stable and radiogenic isotopes, variations of a particular chemical element that has a different number of neutrons. He studies isotopes to measure climate and environmental change in ancient seas and oceans.

Earlier this year, Brand and his team of researchers published a paper showing that Hudson Bay seawater has been dramatically warming since the 1970s, for a total change in seawater temperature of 3.7 C.

The paper suggests that polar regions are extremely sensitive indicators of climate change.

Brand says he was on “cloud nine” when he heard the news of our success in the 2015 EU Horizon 2020 competition.

“I have almost 40 years of experience, (and) that is something I want to pass on,” he says. “I want to share this with the next generation – not just how to do this analysis but think in terms of what the results of this analysis means.”

He notes that hosts such as Brock University will also benefit from the funding through support for laboratory and research costs.