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My name is Dalia Kirschbaum. I'm a researcher in the hydrology lab
here at Goddard Space Flight Center, and my focus is landslide modeling.
I grew up in Minnesota,
we have flooding, we have drought. There are no landslides, except in the nortnern areas
of Minnesota, and very small ones at that. So
looking at earthquakes or hurricanes was such a crazy phenomenon.
And I loved the idea that nature was just so powerful,
and that we could actually use data
from above the Earth to figure out what's happening on the surface and in the
atmosphere.
Music.
So I was always very interested in math, and so all through school I kind of thought that I was
going to be either a math major or do something with math. And then freshman year of college,
I took a very interesting class on different environmental issues.
And I found that I was really fascinated with natural disasters
but what I realized is that you can actually apply math and you can apply science to real-world
topics, and you can use the information
that you get or the results from your models to really help
people and try to mitigate against these hazards.
So I decided to go to graduate school with a focus in
applying remotely-sensed--or satellite data--to evaluate hazards
all different types of natural disasters. In my dissertation
I focused in landslides because I felt that it was a very
underrepresented hazard in the grand scheme of natural disaster research.
I really am looking at quite global scales, and I'm trying to figure out
how landslides are occurring and modeling the activity, from everything from
the local, you know, one hillslope scale, to the regional level,
like Central America, to then the global scale. Most
of my studies were done in the computer lab or
looking at different models, but I did take some very interesting field
trips during graduate school and even during undergrad to look
at different rock formations, to look at kind of landslide scars,
and what you realize is how important it is to
really understand the total environment, in order to really get a sense of
what is causing these hazards. I think the most important thing is to
continue learning and to continue pushing
what you think is interesting and find a way to get yourself there.
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