Erik Garcia Neefjes
3rd Year PhD Student
One of the most rewarding experiences of my PhD is being able to attend to conferences and the opportunity to introduce myself and present my research to a wide audience of professionals. After two and a half years of PhD studies, I have had the chance to visit some great places within the UK and Europe, and now Australia! KOZWaves is a biennial conference focused on the study wave science and is always held somewhere within Australia and New Zealand. I first heard of it in my PhD first year and thought how amazing it would be to get to know a new community and give a talk at this event. Two years later I was very happy to receive the news that my talk: "Wave Propagation in Thermo-Visco-Elastic Continua" had been accepted to KOZWaves 2020 which was held at the University of Melbourne from the 17-19th of February.
The conference exceeded my expectations with great speakers talking from gravitational waves to water waves as well as light, sound and vibrations (to name just a few!) They showcased - the well known fact of - how waves describe so many physical phenomena of the world that surrounds us.
The conference exceeded my expectations with great speakers talking from gravitational waves to water waves as well as light, sound and vibrations (to name just a few!) They showcased - the well known fact of - how waves describe so many physical phenomena of the world that surrounds us.
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The next step of the journey was a visit to the University of Adelaide in South Australia which is an 80 minute flight from Melbourne's Tullamarine Airport. As a keen surfer myself, before taking the flight I paid a visit to URBNSURF, a new facility for surfing artificial waves (again waves!) in a big pool right by the airport which was super fun!
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I spent three fantastic days at the University of Adelaide visiting Dr. Luke Bennetts. I gave a talk to the Mechanics group on "Modelling Thermo-Viscous Damping in Continua".
 |  We also discussed some interesting problems involving the interaction of waves in ice-ocean systems together with Prof. Malte Peter, who was also visiting Luke. They showed me around Adelaide where the Fringe festival was, coincidentally, also taking place. Thanks again Luke and Malte! |
| After this, I headed up to Sydney and visited Prof. Nicole Kessissoglou and her research group at the University of New South Wales with whom I spent a great day and was shown some of their fantastic work in the field of acoustic metamaterials. I went for a small trip down to the stunning South Coast and got to see first hand the impact that the fires had on the small communities, it was devastating to see how so many homes have been completely burned down as well hectares of land.  |  |
Finally, I visited Dr. Stuart Hawkins at Macquarie University in Sydney and some of his colleagues including Dr. Elena Vynogradova and her PhD student Martin Sagradian. I gave an hour long talk similar to the one I presented in Adelaide and had some interesting conversations. Stuart showed me some very impressive numerical computations via the use of the T-matrix approach for multiple scattering problems.
I would like to thank the MWM group and my supervisors for giving me this opportunity and look forward to the next few months.
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