Voarintsoa awarded Faculty for the Future Fellowship

Geology doctoral student Ny Riavo Voarintsoa has been selected for the Faculty for the Future Fellowship Award, sponsored by the Schlumberger Foundation to support talented women from developing and emerging countries who are pursuing advanced degrees in science and engineering at leading universities:

Recipients are chosen based on their leadership qualities, academic ability and engagement toward science and education as a development tool in their home country.

Voarintsoa, a native of Madagascar, studies paleoclimate, the changes in climate throughout history. Her current research focuses on the use of cave deposits, particularly stalagmites, to understand these changes in southern Africa and Madagascar.

"I use geochemistry, petrography and mineralogy as approaches to reconstruct paleoclimate records in southern Africa and Madagascar, two regions of the Earth that have received the least attention in paleoclimate studies," she said. "Stalagmites provide excellent paleoclimate records because they can be accurately dated and climate data from them can be carefully investigated at very high resolution, at annual or seasonal scale. This improves our understanding of land-ocean-atmosphere interactions at shorter time intervals."

A very significant award in several aspects, and 'Faculty for the Future' has an especially nice ring to it. Congratulations to Voarintsoa and her faculty mentors in the department of geography. The ecosystem of Madagascar could be one of the great indicators of the impact of climate change, and these investigations will have important benefits to the scientific community.

Image: Ny Riavo Voarintsoa