Visit to US [December 4th - 15th]

Hi, this is Moiz, D3 student in Kawasaki Research Group. In this post I'd like to write about my recent visit to US from December 4th to 15th. The purpose of this visit was to present at a seminar at Harvard University arranged by Kawasaki-sensei and to present my poster at AGU (American Geophysical Union) Fall Meeting 2019. So, I got to visit two states this time i.e. California and Massachusetts.

December 4th - 8th - Massachusetts

Harvard University Campus

I had always wanted to visit famous universities such as Harvard and MIT, so I was pretty excited about this trip. On the first day, we had a quick tour of the campus and it looked like something out of a movie. The architecture of the buildings had a very striking resemblance to those from movies such as Harry Potter, especially with a blanket of white snow on top. 

Harvard Campus

Another interesting thing about Harvard's campus was that it seemed significantly lively. There were a lot of common spaces always filled with students or researchers. In fact, these common spaces made one feel as if they were at home. I guess a comfortable environment is really necessary to enhance one's ability to think creatively.


Seminar at Harvard University

Kawasaki-sensei kindly arranged a seminar at CGA (Center of Geographic Analysis) for me to present my research related to robust energy planning. The title of my talk was 'Integrating Geospatial Technologies with Advanced Hydrological Models for Robust Energy Planning' (more details available here). Although, I was pretty excited about this talk (being at Harvard) I was pretty nervous as well since this talk was the longest I have ever delivered (up to 1 hour). Nonetheless, I think I was able to engage in a pretty interesting discussion with the audience and received several interesting comments on how to improve the hydropower site selection tool that we previously developed (published here).

Seminar at CGA, Harvard University

Additionally, I was also able to participate in a workshop associated with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) with other members of the Kawasaki Research Group gave very interesting presentations along with others from Harvard. It was interesting to see how GIS is being used in so many different ways across different research areas and it also gave me several ideas on how I can improve my tool as well.


Massachusetts Institute of Technology

On the last day, I was able to meet with an alumni from Meguro Lab at The University of Tokyo, who is currently at Florida International University doing his PhD. Coincidently, he was also in Boston at the same time and was kind enough to show me around Boston and visit the campus of MIT with me. As an engineer and academic, visiting MIT had always been a dream. Right, across the road from MIT we could also see the beautiful skyline of Boston.

MIT Campus

Boston's Skyline

December 9th - 15th - California

AGU Fall Meeting 2019

Since this was my second time attending AGU, I better able to navigate through its schedule with a huge number of interesting presentations. This time I was also able to meet several researchers whose research I've been following very keenly over the past several years. I think the discussion with these researchers really helped me to think about the next steps in my research with a possibility of collaboration.

Also, this time several people came to see my poster. It did however seem this research area (role of lapse rates in distributed hydrological models) hasn't been fully explored yet and very few researchers are working on it at this moment. It was also pretty lucky that Prof. Yang Kun from Tsinghua University (also alumni of The University of Tokyo) attended my poster presentation and gave me several interesting suggestions for my research in Snow Hydrology.

Poster Presentation at AGU

Additionally, I was able to catch up with several other recent alumni from our lab who were also attending AGU and discuss what kind of research or work were they up to.

Visit to UC Berkeley

Kawasaki-sensei also arranged a visit to UC Berkeley, which was pretty exciting as I've met several people back in Pakistan who graduated from this university. We also got a glimpse of what kind of different projects are researchers working on over there.

UC Berkeley's Campus

Posters at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

San Francisco

Despite the busy schedule, luckily I could make some time to have a look around San Francisco. Unfortunately, the weather was pretty cloudy so it was difficult to get a good shot of the Golden Gate Bridge which was pretty much completely covered with fog.

Golden Gate Bridge

Close up view (surrounded by fog)

It seemed like most people prefer to use cars in San Francisco since the streets were always lined with parked cars. The steep streets of San Francisco also looked like something out of several famous movies. It would make sense however to use a car here instead of traversing these steep slopes on foot.

Steep streets of San Francisco

Lastly, I could also enjoy eating Halal burgers at several places, something I really missed in Tokyo due to my food restriction. I was very surprised to see many places selling halal burgers in the US including the campuses of most universities.

Halal Burger at San Francisco

All in all, I had a really great time in these 2 weeks, especially since more people from our research group joined this time and I got to visit several famous universities. I'm very thankful to Kawasaki-sensei for creating such an interesting opportunity.