Welcome

Welcome to my PhD studies webpage. This is my personal space in the www where I will update (hopefully?) on a more regular basis. Here you will find most of my work towards earning my doctoral degree in geology. Although I am a volcanologist, the diploma that I will receive will say PhD in Geology (or something else in this line). There is no PhD in volcanology per se, because volcanology is a one of the specializations in geology.

I arrived at ULB last year, 02 April 2015. Stayed for three months. This is the arrangement of my graduate studies. The program is 4 years, 2 years will be spent at ULB and 2 years will be spent at PHIVOLCS. The 2 years at ULB will still be spread over the 4 year period i.e., 1st year stay (2015) is 3 months, 2nd year stay (2016) is 4 months; 3rd year stay (2017) is 6 months; and finally 4th and final stay (2018) is 1 year. For me, this works better than staying the whole of 2 years because my study area are the volcanoes in the Philippines and spending some time in the Philippines will definitely benefit my project. I collect samples from the thermal springs on a regular basis so that I have the temporal control over my data and it is important that if there is an activity on the volcano, such as a phreatic eruption, to sample the springs and see if the composition of the waters have changed.

This year, I hope to finish the analysis of my samples from the last time I was in the Philippines. I hope to continue writing the manuscript that I have started on one of the volcanoes that I am working on. And lastly, I hope that I could start analysing my samples in the ICP-OES here at ULB and compare my results to the ICP-OES analysis at UCL. If the results are within the acceptable analytical errors, then I may start doing the ICP-OES analysis here instead of sending all my samples to UCL.

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