Dr Andrew McGonigle has recently returned from Germany, where he was asked to speak on his research work, alongside Nobel Prize winning physicist John Mather in a breakfast session at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Conference.
The Lindau conference takes place annually as a highly prestigious gathering of Nobel Prize winners and 600 students and post docs from across the globe. During the week the Laureates led talks on the state of the art in their fields, inspiring the next generation of researchers.
This year, the theme was Physics, and as one of the key event sponsors Rolex asked Andrew to present a breakfast session, alongside John Mather, who won his Nobel Prize for work on measuring cosmic background radiation, emanating from the Big Bang explosion. Andrew spoke to the students on the work he does with Tom Pering, Tom Wilkes and Tehnuka Ilanko on adapting approaches from Physics to improve our ability to monitor volcanoes. This led on to a question and answer session with Andrew and John, probing the challenges of performing measurements in extreme volcanic environments or those of outer space.