MAGNET PhD trainee Evelyn Freres won the Data Speaks! storytelling competition at the Resources for Future Generations (RFG) conference in Vancouver this week (June 16-21, 2018).

Students were challenged to reimagine their research with a non-specialist audience in mind, with the goal of educating their audience about what they do, why they do it, and why it’s important.

The top 40 candidates were then invited to a 5-minute video interview during the conference.  Students were judged on the accessibility of their research to a non-specialist audience, their reasoning and their creativity.

Evelyn’s original abstract title “Can you really trust your neodymium isotopic ratios?” was revised to “Do you trust your data?”  In her video, Evelyn explains that her research aims to discover the limitations to acquiring precise and accurate data, which will in turn help other researchers “understand our planet in the best possible way.”

Click here to watch Evelyn’s award-winning video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bInUp8CA18g&t=9s

Evelyn was subsequently interviewed by the competition host Seequent, a global leader in the development of visual data science software and collaborative technologies.

In this article, Evelyn takes us through her scientific journey, from digging up her grandmother’s backyard in Brazil to analysing neodymium isotopes on a mass spectrometer in Canada:

https://www.seequent.com/blog/2018/8/7/digging-for-answers-making-data-more-reliable-for-geochemists

Another MAGNET PhD trainee, Rhy McMillan, was also selected as one of the top 40 candidates.  Rhy’s original abstract title “Splitting Obsidians: Striking a Balance Between Precision, Accuracy, and Preservation with SS-LA-ICP-MS during Obsidian Belonging Provenance Studies” was revised to “Increasing our Confidence in the Interpretation or the Identification of the Geologic Source of Obsidian Belongings Found at Archeological Sites.”

Click here to watch Rhy’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOIwNdn_69g