This year, one of the twenty young people selected at the national level for the Doctoral Scholarship Competition that is awarded annually by the National Agency for Research and Development, ANID, and its German simile (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, DAAD), is the current Teaching Collaborator of the Department of Earth Sciences of the University of Concepción, Diego Volosky Medina.
The native of Osorno graduated two years ago from the Geology career taught by the aforementioned academic unit of the Faculty of Chemical Sciences UdeC and has worked providing support in teaching activities of various subjects, mainly those carried out in the “laboratory microscopy, for example, metalliferous deposits, geological models of deposits, sedimentary petrography and collaborating with other branches when necessary such as mineralogy, stratigraphy, field geology and, from time to time, if necessary, for example, I have gone to the field ” .
Regarding the studies that he will carry out in Europe, Diego explains that they will be carried out at the University of Jena located in the city of the same name, in the state of Thuringia. He comments that, in the middle of the pandemic, through Professor Sylvia Palma, he made contact with the biologist UdeC and doctor of the University of Münster Philippe Moisan, current academic at the U. de Atacama. “He has studied the Northern Triassic with German colleagues and they saw that lately fossils are surfacing that have not yet been worked on here.”
“He specializes only in plants and some invertebrate fossils are coming out and, therefore, it occurred to them that this would be a good research topic, considering that in Germany there are some well-known paleontologists who study these issues,” explains Diego and details that this is the second time that he has applied for this line of funding and he attributes the fact that he was not awarded it on the previous occasion due to his limited experience in research and teaching, shortcomings that he was able to revert over the last year and a half, since in addition to his formal functions in the DCT and his participation in meetings in the area such as the II Chilean Congress of Paleontology Taguatagua 2022 among others, he maintains, “I was able to collaborate on an article by Professor Fernanda Álvarez.”
“I also graduated with a good average, which gave me a good ranking and that also helped me a lot with the scholarship. In addition, I was improving my subject proposal with the help of the teachers in Germany”, he details and highlights, although he has some knowledge of German, this is not a decisive factor in obtaining this funding, since the evaluators “are more interested in the quality of the project.
One of the Teutonic researchers with whom he will collaborate is Dr. Jörg Schneider, who “has a long history in paleontology, specializing in biostratigraphy and paleoecology and, on the other hand, Dr. Frank Scholze, specializing in fossil invertebrates as such, which are my subject”.
“I am going to specialize in a group of crustaceans called conchostracos, which, in very simple words, are small shrimp that come in two shells like a clam, and there were records of this in Chile. but very little work done.
“In general,” he details, “invertebrate paleontology is very little developed in Chile, apart from molluscs or, especially, bivalves, ammonites and gastropods and, in general, there is little interest.”
“Despite,” explains Diego, “the fact that (the conchostracos) are a very specific and elaborate group of animals, they are very important in the geological field because they are used as biostratigraphic indicators, that is, they can indicate a time interval in a It was geological, in turn, very specific, so it has great potential to be used in other geological investigations”, he highlights.
For the Head of Geology Career, Dr. Verónica Oliveros Clavijo, this award is a relevant institutional milestone. “From the point of view of the development of paleontology in Chile, the award of this scholarship is very important because it allows the critical mass of researchers in this area to grow, which is strong at the University of Concepción and in the Geology major, in a certain way with the school created by Professor Sylvia Palma”, he affirms.
“Therefore, it is very significant that one of our graduates manages to follow these specialization studies at a prestigious university abroad, so it is a great happiness for the career and, obviously, we are happy for Diego as well”, says the academic.
The stay is expected to begin between August and October of next year and, in the long term, the young researcher’s plans are, upon his return to the country, to be able to integrate as an academic at a university so, he details, “to be able to start training students who They can collaborate with these same work teams with those of Germany, because with them I eventually want to build a scheme of their work at a global level”.
Finally, Diego appealed directly “to the students who are in their last year of Geology who dare to investigate, who try to integrate into work teams, to make collaborations, to approach external professors and professionals to begin to further develop their interests and their research”.
In this sense, he affirms that the fact of having been awarded this scholarship, despite not having a master’s degree like many of the other candidates, is due to the preparation received in the DCT. “From all the experience I have accumulated here, that was not an impediment”, so, he affirms, “it would be good to see more interest on the part of the students to focus on research, because the conditions for it are here, there is a good teaching team who can support that with their projects”.
