Profile

Hi there! My name is Marina (my pronouns are she/her), I am 24 years old and I am originally from Spain. I moved to Edinburgh to study Physics at university, but decided to stay because I love Scotland! I usually spend my days with my good friend the computer, analysing data and looking at maps. However, I love being out in nature, so whenever I can I’ll take a break to walk around and see some cool birds – or squirrels! I also really enjoy playing the piano and drawing, even though I am not very good at it, it’s great to do something artsy after my daily dose of science! Also, fun fact about myself… I absolutely love sharks and have a wide collection of shark fun facts at the ready for every situation!!

My work mainly involves studying landslides. Landslides cause hundreds of deaths every year and lots of roads and railways are destroyed because of them, which costs a lot of money. However, it is really hard to predict them. They can be caused by very heavy rain, earthquakes, or man made causes, such as building infrastructure in the wrong places! Because areas with landslides can be really hard to access, satellite images come in really handy. I can take thousands of images of the same area, before and after heavy rain for example and look at how the land slips. And I can do this for most places around the world! As you can imagine, this is A LOT of images, and it would take me years to look at every single landslide that’s ever happened. Thankfully, this is why I have artificial intelligence to help me with this task! I know “artificial intelligence” can sound quite scary, but it is basically some fancy pants Maths equations to help me collect information from these thousands of images much, much faster! Which means that I have more time to play the piano and go for walks, yay! (This is not strictly true, I still have to sit in front of the computer and look at all the information and do all sorts of fancy things with the numbers I collected, but at least I can do this within a reasonable timescale (4 years), instead of dying of old age and still be looking at maps on a screen!).

Working as  PhD student is lots of fun, but you are also busy all the time! Most days I usually just sit on my computer reading articles about landslides and about how we can use maths, statistics and computers to solve really hard problems, such as predicting when a landslide is going to happen. There’s a lot of trial and error involved, and often I have to try out multiple things until I find a method that works. However, this way I learn lots of new things, which I love doing! I have a supervisor, how is an expert on landslides, and he helps me out whenever I get stuck on a tricky problem. I meet up with him once a week, and I am also part of a research group, where other students and supervisors meet up to discuss interesting ideas and to just catch up every week! I also get the chance to go to talks from people in other subjects, which is very exciting cause you get to know what other people are studying and can make really good friends from it! I also get to teach at the university, where I help out in some maths and computing courses, which is also a lot of fun and a great way to share what you learn!

I have included a picture of my office (even though now with Covid we can’t go in) and of me explaining my work in front of other students.

The  Syrian Teenagers Tutoring and Education Programme (STTEPS) is a tutoring initiative based at Edinburgh, first of its kind in Scotland and the UK. The initiative (composed of weekly two hour tutoring sessions)  is aimed  at supporting the teenage Syrian refugees in their school subjects. The tutoring scheme’s goals are to help the newly arrived Syrian teenagers, with their English language skills, and with education in other subjects as well as social integration.

They are currently composed of around 40 students and 50 tutors, and as well as organising tutoring sessions they also plan a wide range of activities including visits to local museums, sports events and singing sessions!

If I get the money, I would like to collaborate with them and organise science and engineering related events such as visits to the Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh (a museum that tells the story of the Earth from the Big Bang to modern day), organise geological and engineering trips in the local area with local researchers (for example around local extinct volcano Arthur’s seat and the Forth Bridges) and visits to the Bayes center, which is one of the main Space technology hubs in the UK, building lots of new satellite technology.

Aside from these possible activities I would work closely with them, and the co-founder of the programme, Estifa’a Zaid to organise science related activities tailored to the needs of the group.

I have chosen to support this program because I think it’s really important to support teenage refugees in local communities where they can often feel isolated and face discrimination. This programs is fighting this and offering these students an opportunity to engage them in the community, build confidence and promote school success!