Dr Karen Meyer – Scottish Crucible 2016

Lecturer, Division of Computing and Mathematics

School of Design and Informatics, Abertay University

https://www.abertay.ac.uk/staff-search/dr-karen-meyer

k.meyer@abertay.ac.uk

I am a lecturer in Applied Mathematics and researcher in Solar Physics at Abertay University. I attended the 2016 Scottish Crucible. The workshops were engaging and informative. I think that they really boosted my confidence as a researcher, and opened my eyes to the importance of interdisciplinary research and creativity. It was a fantastic opportunity to meet other early career researchers and to learn about the research being conducted in Scotland across such a wide variety of disciplines. I particularly enjoyed the workshop on media, public engagement and informing policy. I have since become a STEM ambassador, and regularly engage in outreach at science festivals and in schools.

Since the Scottish Crucible:

• I have successfully obtained a Carnegie Research Incentive Grant to fund a project simulating the effect of small-scale processes on the evolution and decay of solar active regions.
• I obtained a travel grant from the Royal Observatory of Belgium to work on a collaborative project with their PROBA2 science team. The project uses observations from their satellite PROBA2/SWAP to validate and inform the development of simulations of the Sun’s global magnetic field structure and evolution.
• I now co-supervise an interdisciplinary PhD project, developing a fluid-aerosol solver to model cloud formation in brown dwarf and exoplanetary atmospheres.