Dr. Nils C. Prieur

Dr. Nils C. Prieur

Planetary scientist

Arrival in the US

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Hi people, this is the first entry on the blog. Whoop whoop! This is kicking off the start of the BOULDERING Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global fellowship funded by the European Union (thanks again!). But, first, if you want to learn more about a Marie Curie postdoc, please have a look here. This fellowship will last for three years, two years at Stanford University, and the last twelve months at the Department of Geosciences at the University of Oslo. I am not sure how those three next years will go, but I am motivated and will do my best to share the evolution of the project with you along the way on this blog. So let’s start this fellowship (as the European Research Council likes to call this postdoctoral research position). I secretly like to think about this fellowship as the fellowship in The Lord of the Rings. I hope I will manage to throw the One Ring in Mount Doom at tne end of those three next years!

It is now time to move to the Bay Area, more precisely to a place close to Stanford University. Stanford is located about 45 min by car southeast of San Francisco, in the southern part of the Bay Area. I have been planning the move from Norway to the US for those last few days. I lived in many places in the past (South of France, Svalbard, Oslo, Berlin), but I have been mostly living in Oslo for the last ten years. New country, new colleagues, and the pressure of doing a good job make me feel both very excited and scared at the same time. The departure date is the 14th of October 2021. My wife Siri will be with me to help in the transition from Oslo to the Bay Area! She is currently doing a postdoc in botany at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (close to Oslo in Norway). And therefore, she will be traveling a bit back and forth between the two countries. We will stay at a hotel for the first ten days in Menlo Park, just 5-10 min by car from Stanford University. The goal of those first days is to fix as many administrative tasks as possible and, most importantly, find a place to live! The next blog entry will be from the US. I can’t wait. Here I come.

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About my Marie Skłodowska-Curie project – How boulder mapping can help reveal how planetary surfaces evolved

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Craters are very common surface features on many solid planets and moons. During an impact, rock fragments ejected from the crater cavity could be deposited elsewhere on the surface, where they could potentially form secondary craters. Boulders are the only remnants of these ejected materials. Their size and shape, as well as the terrain on which they are found, provide important insight into the ejection mechanisms. Funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the BOULDERING project plans to use high-resolution imaging and deep learning to further investigate the size and shape distributions of boulder populations. Project results could boost our understanding of the planetary surface evolution.

New apartment and meeting colleagues for the first time

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After a memorable first night sleeping on the ground (IKEA could not deliver our madrass the same day! and discovering that the airbed we bought at Target had a huge hole in it! Thanks Target), I got to meet my new kind colleagues at a barbecue event organized by Stanford’s department of Geosciences. In the next two years, I will be part of the Earth and Planetary Surface Processes Lab group (EPSP), led by associate professor Mathieu Lapotre, and which is composed of two postdocts (Lior Rubanenko and Andrew Gunn), two PhDs (Michael Hasson and Colin Marvin) and myself. The EPSP lab focus on the use of comparative planetology (i.e., understanding a specific process we see on Earth to better understand this same process on another planetary surfaces) with topics such as dune and river processes. A much better description of the group can be found here: https://epsp.stanford.edu/. The barbecue event was a very good icebreaker.

Getting settled at Stanford

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Bonjour guys! The ten first days in the US have been super hectic and a bit crazy. After the crazy jet lag of the first days, we set ourselves in the quest of finding an apartment relatively close to Stanford University. Easier said than done. The Bay Area is infamously known for its pricey accommodations, and I have to mention that I would never have been able to live in the Bay Area without the help of the Norwegian Research Council, which is generously helping me in addition to the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global grant. Of course, I could have lived in a cheap community house (well, it is actually not that cheap! about 1500 USD per month), sharing a house with 10 other poor academic people. However, I feel that I am past this period of my life, and it is more practical to have my own place, so that my wife and family members can easily come for visit! Anyway, we visited about ten apartments before finding the right place in Palo Alto Downtown. This place is only a few minutes by bike from Stanford University, pretty cosy and one of the most affordable places we have been visiting. After opening a bank account and transferring quickly the deposit and first rent from my Norwegian account, we got the keys of our new apartment just one week after we moved to the US! I think we deserve a cheering clap on our shoulders. Good job! In the looong list of things that was fixed during the first days, we bought two bikes as we had to unfortunately to return our car rental. We now have to survive with bikes in the country of CARS! gl hf! (good luck, have fun!). Ok, I got to go to fix more stuff. Next on the list (Internet, US phone, Social Security Number, Health insurance and much more!). Help!