Joanne Heslop and Egbert Jolie are the new fellows funded by the GFZ Discovery Fund (former Topic Innovation Fund TIF). The fellowships of this second round will run for a maximum duration of three years. Successful candidates are expected to perform innovative projects and to identify future fields of research within the GFZ research units.

The research topic can be freely chosen but must be assigned to one of the GFZ’s research units of the fourth funding period of the program-oriented funding of the Helmholtz Association POF IV, have an interdisciplinary approach, and be realized in close cooperation with at least two GFZ sections. The positions are expected to improve cooperation between the single research units.

Joanne Heslop comes from Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, and has started her postdoc fellowship in October. Egbert Jolie joins GFZ from Iceland GeoSurvey ÍSOR, in Reykjavík, Iceland, and will start in January 2020.

Joanne Henslop’s project is titled “MicroModel: Microscale controls to model microbial greenhouse gas production”. She studied geochemical and microbial controls on methane production in an Arctic thaw lake environment during her PhD at University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Following graduation, she continued to examine organic matter processing and greenhouse gas production in the Canadian High Arctic. The aim of her GFZ Discovery Fellowship project is to incorporate high resolution microbial and organic matter data into geochemical rate models to predict greenhouse gas production potentials. She will be working in GFZ Section Geomicrobiology, and closely collaborate with GFZ Section Organic Geochemistry.

Egbert Jolie will start a project called “Transport of Magmatic Gases and Implication for Georesources and Geohazards”. After graduating from TU Freiberg he became the scientific coordinator of geothermal exploration projects in the East African Rift in Rwanda, Tanzania, at Geozentrum Hannover. During his PhD at TU Berlin an GFZ he developed methods for an improved characterization of fault zones in the Basin-and-Range Province, USA, by the analysis of volcanic gas emissions. This work formed the basis for further research projects in New Zealand, Ethiopia, Mexico, and Iceland, being scientifically coordinated by Egbert. The goal of Egbert’s GFZ Discovery Fellowship project is the development of novel approaches for a systematic detection of magmatic volatiles like CO2 and their integration into observatory systems. (jz)