Participating in conferences is a vital part of research – both for presenting our own work in front of our peers to gauge their reaction and for keeping up to date with the latest work of others. So we all do our best to get to the key meetings. Here are reports of a number of them, some from exotic locations.

Major events included the founding of a new Dual Award MSc degree, jointly with Tyumen State Oil and Gas University, the Science Open Day 1 March, and the new MSc Symposia on 4 September. But there are a number of other events to record.

Fieldwork continues to be a vital part of our research and our staff and research students travel the world to make new discoveries. Southeast Asia remains a major focus – North America and the Arctic also feature. Student field trips, such as the one to Iceland this year, are an essential feature of our courses.

Welcomes and farewells: we have welcomed four new members of the Academic staff: Dan Le Heron, Agüst Gudmundsson, Peter Burgess and Ross Haacke; we have said farewell to Geoff Batt and Marcel Regelous; we are particularly sad to record the death of former research student Barlian Yulihanto.

Congratulations are due to a number of staff and students for their accomplishments and recognition through the year.

Research is at the heart of our academic enterprise. Details of our full range of research activities are shown on the Earth Sciences Department website. Here are a number of research stories from the current year, ranging from air sampling across Europe and Spitsbergen to imaging megaspores and seeds using TOMCAT.

New Staff

The growth of the Department this year is reflected in the appointment of four new teaching staff. Professor Agüst Gudmundsson and Dr Dan Le Heron joined us in February; Professor Peter Burgess arrived in September and Dr Ross Haacke in October. New Post-docs include Ben Clements and Emma Tomlinson.

New Research

Professor McClay's Fault Dynamics Research Group is very active in the new STAR project
Professor Menzies and Dr Tomlinson are busy collecting tephra samples from a range of volcanoes around the world as part of the new RESET project led by Professor John Lowe (Geography Department)
Professor Nisbet's atmospheric methane research group has been collecting new samples and measurement of methane in the Arctic, as part of an International Polar Year project.
The Palaeobotany Group is now using the TOMCAT linear accelerator to image the internal structure of megaspores in 3D
All feature in the Newsletter sections on "Fieldwork" and "Research".

New Resources

Last year saw the refurbishment and upgrade to the Petroleum Geoscioence MSc teaching lab, incuding the installation of a 3D Visualization system and enhanced computer hardware and software to keep us at the industry state of the art. This year, the introduction of the Dual Award Petroleum Geoscience MSc course with Tyumen State Oil and Gas University has required the provision of a video conferencing system, identical units installed in the MSc lab and the conference room. Behind Julie in the photo below is one of the new "Visualisers" and to her right is the plasma display for video conferencing, which gives us the ability to send electronic images both to the data projector and to the video conferencing system. Being internet based, they will allow us to communicate more widely around the world, with other labs and even with people using their laptops in the field.

New Teaching Review

In May the Department was subjected to a "Periodic Departmental Review" when a panel comprising external experts and senior academic and administrative staff within the College examined and audited all the student-related activities in the Department including teaching, curriculum development, organisation and record keeping, student welfare and the general health and welfare of teaching and research in an academic department. Thanks to the intense efforts of Mary Fowler and her team of staff in presenting our case, we came through this intense examination very well and were highly praised (or words to that effect!!). This review process began in 1994 when an expert panel came to the Department for a 5-day-long assessment of our teaching methods and abilities.  This was part of a national audit of the state of university education and we were given the top grade of "Excellent". In subsequent years, departments such as ours were required to submit periodically to largely internal reviews, with external examiners on the panel for good measure. The recent review was the third of these and we are delighted that we have been seen to have maintained our very high standards and that the enthusiasm and dedication of staff and students was so clear.

Conferences

Events

Fieldwork

People

Research

Next

MSc (research) student Julie Gale presents a seminar in the conference room using the new equipment

2008: a Year of Change –New Year, New Name, New Logo

Back in 1985, when the Department was founded, we decided that the right title for us was "Department of Geology" because that is what we did. That title served us well and we built our reputation and made our name on it, internationally. Our graduates have, quite rightly, seen "Geology" featured in the titles of their degrees. Even in those early days we had a sense that Geology would best be served through interdisciplinary collaboration and our accommodation in Queen's Building was designed to that end – academic staff offices are adjacent along two corridors, with care taken to mix sub-disciplines: we did not want all the geophysicists together at one end and all the geochemists at the other. That close mix has paid off, as can be seen in our research by the number of joint papers that have been published over the years and in our postgraduate courses that are all truly multidisciplinary.

But the subject has grown in the past 23 years and so has the Department, both in stature and range. It became apparent some time ago that the study of the Earth and its workings requires an holistic approach to "Earth System Science" involving the interactions over time between all the elements: the atmosphere, the cryosphere, the oceans and the solid Earth. Increasingly, the range and substance of the Department, in its teaching programmes and research, has reflected this change in approach. The study of rocks, minerals and fossils by ever more sophisticated analytical techniques is carried out alongside projects such as the tracking of methane in the atmosphere and nitrogen in ice that inform us about the way the planet works as a system. So, in January 2008, we decided that it would be a good time to change our name and become a Department of Earth Sciences, "because that is what we do."

The College, too, has thought it time to bring our image up to date with a new logo that features the tower of Founders Building as an instantly recogniseable icon. In 1985, the merger of two University of London colleges, Royal Holloway and Bedford, was hardly known outside the University and the first attempt to establish a new identity and call ourselves "Royal Holloway and Bedford New College" was so cumbersome that outside bodies simply called us "Egham". The next step, to call ourselves "Royal Holloway, University of London", was a distinct advance and that, and our abbreviation "RHUL", are now well known and understood throughout the world. But our logo based on red and blue diamonds had nothing to identify who we are, and looked rather like a postage stamp. Now we have a distinctive new logo that gives us an identity that we can be proud of and which we hope will serve us well into the future.

New MSc Degree Courses

We also decided that it was time to restructure and re-name our MSc courses. When "Basin Evolution and Dynamics" was chosen in 1985 as the title of our new MSc course about sedimentary basins we wanted to emphasise its integrated approach involving stratigraphy and sedimentology, structural geology and geophysics using all the techniques employed by the oil industry. Whilst oil companies asked the question "where is the oil?" we asked "how does the geology work?", from which we evolved a valuable synergy with industry. Nowadays that has become accepted practice and we operate in a global market. The new title is a clearly understood description of the course – "petroleum geoscience".

Complementing this, the MSc course dealing with environmental assessment and analysis has been re-styled "Environmental Diagnosis and Management" to reflect the way the subject has evolved and the science and its applications have become more quantified and methodological.

New Head of Department

At the end of August, Mary Fowler handed over to Dave Waltham as Head of Department, having led the Department for the past six years through a challenging and exciting period. She was instrumental in developing the range and quality of our research, extending our teaching, especially at postgraduate level, bringing in vigorous new staff and building our resources, founded on a sound financial basis. She has done a terrific job for us. Dave is bringing in fresh energy and ideas and is already making his mark on the Department.

On 4th September, Head of Department Dave Waltham welcomed guests from industry to the symposia that form the culmination of the two new MSc courses

New Venture

Chris Elders, who has been director of our MSc course in Basin Evolution and Dynamics – now Petroleum Geoscience – for the past 15 years, has been instrumental in creating a new Dual Award MSc course in Petroleum Science at Tyumen State Oil and Gas University (TSOGU) in Siberia, sponsored by TNK–BP, being taught by both Russian and RHUL staff. The "Dual Award" means that the students are enrolled at both TSOGU and RHUL. All the preparation work – refurbishing and equipping labs to modern standards, preparing the academic content of the course, recruiting students, just everything – was completed in less than 12 months so that the course began on time on 29 September with 20 students. Chris tells the fascinating story of how this was achieved in four articles, written during the year, in this Newsletter (see EVENTS)

MSc students and staff who attended the Opening Ceremony on 23 October

Research Assessment RAE2008

The results of the HEFCE national assessment of research quality have just been published. We have come out of this exceptionally well: go to RAE2008 for details