Inspiring research in another continent

One of the greatest rewards for an academic is to see your former students do well in their careers. That was something that I recently got to experience with one of my PhD students, Douglas Plaza, who is now working as an Associate Professor at the Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral (ESPOL) in Guayaquil, Ecuador.

It all started in August 2016 when Monash University received interest from this Institute to establish a joint collaboration, and after two years I took off for the gruelling 36 hour trip from Melbourne to Guayaquil.

I was met on the other side by Douglas where we then travelled to meet with the vice-rector, Professor Paul Herrera Samaniego, and the Director of The Centre for Water and Sustainable Development (CADS), Professor Luis Dominguez. As it turned out, of the four people in this meeting, I was the only person who did not get their PhD in Belgium, despite being the only Belgian.

Prof Dominguez, Douglas and I also met the following day where he explained the challenges related to water that Guayaquil is facing, all of them worsened by the combination of the clearly visible impact of climate change and strong population increase. We were then joined by Professor Indira Nolivos, who has a strong interest in model-based decision support systems. She also obtained her PhD in Belgium!

It was fascinating to learn about how the project that I lead for the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC, Improving flood forecast skill using remote sensing data correlates to the work that is being undertaken in Ecuadorian cities like Duran.

Duran is a neighbour city across the river from Guayaquil, which is using model-based research results regarding the causes of floods. The work performed in this area integrates topics such as flood management, urban heat islands and decision support systems.

I was also given the opportunity to present my work to an audience consisting of students; representatives from the Ecuador Electric Corporation; the National Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology; the Local Government of Guayas; the Local Council; the local water authority; and the Secretary of the Environmental Risk Management Authority. 

There was plenty of time for questions and discussion afterwards, which was the perfect opportunity to discuss not only the technical details, but also how collaboration between universities and the public sector and industry is organised in Australia.

Following this presentation, Douglas and I received an invitation to meet with the Ecuadorian Environmental Risk Management Authority. This is where we met with the flood modellers, who are facing enormous challenges in data acquisition for model calibration and validation.

We assumed this meeting was going to last for an hour, but as any researcher knows, assumptions can sometimes be quite unrealistic, and we left the building a little after three hours!

The overall conclusion of the meeting was to collaborate with ESPOL to advance the authority’s flood modelling, more specifically for the data acquisition and the model improvement. 

Discussing flood modelling and frameworks is very encouraging for me, as it shows that there are similar projects to my CRC work developing elsewhere. I am now in Colombia, where I am working with more researchers to learn how Australia can better collaborate with South America.