This year’s AOGS-AGU (WPGM) Joint Assembly will be held at the Resorts World Sentosa (RWS) in Singapore from August 13-17.
Not only is it one of the biggest science conferences in Asia, but ESSIC’s own Professor Raghu Murtugudde was recently chosen as a distinguished lecturer for this year’s event.
Murtugudde is specifically scheduled to speak at the Ocean Sciences section of the conference on Thursday, August 16.
Murtugudde said he has been to the conference previously and said he even gave an invited talk several years ago.
Being chosen as a distinguished lecturer for the conference is an honor, and Murtugudde said distinguished lecturers are chosen based on their accomplishments.
“They have a committee that picks people,” said Murtugudde.
Though he recently received official notice he would be speaking in Singapore, Murtugudde said he knew he was being considered because they asked for his photograph, but he wasn’t completely sure what he was being considered for.
“I didn’t know exactly what was being given to me,” he said.
Murtugudde’s presentation is on Regional Earth System Prediction for Asia: A Decision-Making tool for Sustainability.
He has already done extensive work with sustainability, and last year, he was named a Leopold Leadership Fellow and also led a program abroad to teach sustainability in India. And Murtugudde thinks this is a major reason he was chosen as one of the lecturers.
“We are proposing a center on food and water security in South Asia or Southeast Asia through USAID and Singapore as partners,” Murtugudde said. “I don’t know if [those from the conference have] heard of it or not, but the talk I will give is about regional earth system modeling for water, food, human health, fisheries and so on.”
Murtugudde said his work and presentation will directly relate to technologies and techniques that can be used to help countries in Asia, like Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, which all have various economic backgrounds.
Though several months away, the conference already has five days of scheduled scientific sessions, as well as scheduled presentations from professors from all over the world.
The conference is partially put on by AOGS, or the Asia Oceania Geosciences Society, which was set up nearly a decade ago to promote those in the field of geosciences, especially in Asia and Oceania.
AOGS also stresses the importance of cooperation between different science and geoscience groups, and this particular joint assembly is with the American Geophysical Union (AGU).
“This year, AGU has a joint assembly with the Asian Union, so it’s going to be much bigger than normal,” Murtugudde said.
Murtugudde said he’s curious to see how the conference and discussions will work because many of the tools he will discuss are developed in the United States, and he’s interested in seeing how they can be applied to regions in Asia where people need them but also need to be trained to use them.
In addition, Murtugudde is looking forward to the connections he will be able to make in Singapore.
“Because of this high profile talk, they will have me meeting all the other high profile people, so I’m looking forward to making the links,” he said.
Past AOGS conferences have taken place in different locations, from Taiwan to India to South Korea to Thailand, but this is the fifth year the event will take place in Singapore.
