I’m now six months into my year-long Panton Fellowship and so it’s time to give a short overview of what I’ve achieved so far.  The last quarter has been a busy one that’s for sure with conferences, OA forums, school meetings and instrument developments.

Presenting some AQ research at the AQ Conference 2014

In March I spent a week in the beautiful Garmisch-Partenkirchen at the Air Quality Conference.  Whilst I was there as well as enjoying some delicious Bavarian cuisine and presenting some of my PhD research I presented a poster on my Panton work and got some great feedback. Overall everyone seemed to agree that air quality data was a great candidate for an open data project especially with the increasing amount of attention the issue has been getting recently in Europe.  I also had some interesting discussions about the species I am measuring and there was some consensus that I may want to start with a simpler measurement plan so that may be implemented in the near future.

At The University of Leicester we recently had our Research week and as part of that The University Library hosted and Open Access forum. Our special invited guests for this forum were Peter Murray-Rust and Michelle Brook who I was pleased to finally meet in person! It turned out to be a really interesting event where lots of OA issues were discussed in an informal setting. You can see the kind of things that were discussed on PMR’s blog.  I thought that this was a great event with researchers, librarians and OA advocates all discussing the issues surrounding OA. It was especially interesting to see all of the figures that have come out of Michelle’s recent work on the Wellcome Trust APC dataset.

After another meeting with the school that I’m working with we now have a date for installation of the instruments and the start of the project.  We are currently working together to plan an introductory session for the students that will introduce them to the project and get them to think about where we might want to install the instruments. As I mentioned in my last blog post I now have a webpage to host my data and the sensor has undergone some calibrations in the lab.

Not a bad view from the conference centre in Garmisch-Partenkirchen

I’ve also been busy contributing to a citizen science in atmospheric science review paper which is now under review and preparing to present as part of a short course on school outreach at EGU in Vienna at the end of the month.

So a busy few months but I think for me the next couple of months look to be the most exciting with installation of sensors and data streaming in.