Alexis: 0:00

Hello. Hello everybody and welcome to the Smoko Podcast. My name is Alexis Armstrong, your host. Nice to meet you. The Smoko Podcast is a place to celebrate and highlight women working within stem and trade occupations. So please join us. Tune in, take a break. We're onco and today we're extremely lucky to be joined by the lovely, soon-to-be Doctor Zoe Estrem. Zoe is a PhD student at the University of Alberta where she's a geophysicist. Her research focuses on understanding different near surface resistivity measurements into the MT inversion model. And that's in order to reliably model deeper resistivity structures. Zoe is part of a team and group within Canada that's, looking into imaging, characterizing and modeling Canada's geothermal resources. So we're also gonna talk all things geothermal. Her work is heavily field-based, so we're gonna talk about her field work and what that entails. And then as if she's not busy enough writing a PhD and doing all this work, she is also an active member of the physics department's equity, diversity, and inclusivity group. Zoe, thank you so much for coming on today. It is a pleasure to have you on the show. I'm so excited to talk with you.

Zoe: 1:11

Yeah. Thanks Alexis for having me. I'm very excited to be here and, sharing all the work we've been doing. It's very exciting.

Alexis: 1:18

To start us off is like something in your background that really stood out, and I think it's really different than most people who are in geosciences, is that you were so straightforward, like you did a BSC and geophysics, and then you did an MSC and GEODynamics, and if I understand correctly, your dad's. A geophysicist and he inspired you and influenced you to become a geophysicist as well. Could you walk through how he inspired you and how you got into this field

Zoe: 1:46

yeah, it's pretty unusual to start out in geophysics I think, cuz it's not really something you hear about in. High school even. Like basically you get into university and you're like, what the heck is geophysics? But it is just the study of the physics of rocks. So it's nothing too crazy. I started out in geophysics, and then I just really loved it and I just, Never stopped. And how I got into it, I actually, when I graduated high school, I wanted to go into math. And my dad, It was pretty hands off he is like, oh, you know, you can do whatever you want. And I actually have five siblings and, we all went, different ways and I was the only one who followed him. And yeah, it was mostly just hiking. When I was a kid and, looking at rocks and, I got older and I was like, well, maybe because cuz I went through a phase where I was like, I wanna be just like my dad when I grow up. Ah. And then I was like, in high school, I was like, oh, that's so embarrassing. And then, And then I got to university, I was like, oh no, I actually do wanna be just like my dad. Aw.

Alexis: 2:50

I love, I absolutely love that. Like I love that cycle cuz it's so stereotypical hitting on teenage years and being like, nah. Like he's not that cool. And then as you get older to be like, yeah, exactly. I wanna become exactly like,

Zoe: 3:04

oh actually he was cool the whole time. Yeah. No, I'm gonna

Alexis: 3:06

do this. He was the OG of geophysics within our family. Yeah. I mean, physics of rocks are. Really cool. You're like, oh yeah, it's not a big deal. I mean, it is a big deal. It's super interesting. It's really hard. I always remember everyone going through it that they were freaking out. What made you love it so much and when you were learning it, did you get to go back home and talk with your dad at like the kitchen table or call him up before an exam to be like, what the hell is this? Did you have that kind of aspect of it when you went through your undergrad and your master's?

Zoe: 3:38

Yeah, I mean, me and my dad, we do study really different, areas of geophysics. He's in seismic and I'm in electromagnetics, there's not too much overlap there, but the actual like fundamentals of rocks, cuz they all behave really differently, which is really honestly fascinating. If you think about. The physical properties of a sandstone, it's got all this, pore space and structure to it. And then you think about a granite and it's like a solid crystalline piece of rock, and they behave really differently. both like. Electrically and physically, so seismic waves, they travel physically by vibrating the rocks. And then electromagnetics, they have electrons inside of the rocks. So you would imagine, water is ma the main, conductor of electricity in, Like a sandstone, but then in a granite you actually have toran move the electrons through the actual crystal piece. Each area of geophysics is pretty different. But they all have a lot of crossover and then seeing it from all the different angles can get a lot of information about, what's down there. And yeah, I do like literally still call my dad to talk about.

Alexis: 4:50

I love that. That's amazing.

Zoe: 4:52

Like that. Oh God. I went and I saw this really cool talk and he is oh, wow. And sometimes I'm like, he'll call me actually sometimes cuz he has, a couple projects in Turkey that are geothermal. And so he'll call me and be like, oh yeah, no, I, I have this thing at work and we're working on this project. What do you think of that? And I'm like, oh yeah, that's really fascinating dad. And so we just. A couple of rock nerds.

Alexis: 5:19

What a blessing. That's such a wonderful thing to have a mentor in your family and to have someone going through it that you could talk to It's really cool to hear too, the differences that each rock in each structure is gonna be dependent or different. In terms of geophysics. I know that the one thing that your PhD is really focusing in on and like your research is focused in on mt. Could you explain what this is and then why do you love to specialize in this? What aspect of MT that you were like, yep. This is the most interesting thing for me. I'm obsessed. I'm gonna study that.

Zoe: 5:57

So MT is, okay, so you, it's two words. It's put together, so it's Magni, so we're measuring the magnetic field and toric, which is the electric field. And the ratio between the two is gonna tell us about the resistivity structure underneath. So essentially you go out to the field and you put down, some sort of magnetometer. It's basically a, like a loop of wire that's, Like when you have a change in magnetic field, it's gonna create a current in that wire, and then you're measuring the voltage across that. And then you have some electrodes that are placed a hundred meters apart ish. And you're measuring the voltage across that. That'll tell you about the electric field in the ground as well. You're measuring like the naturally occurring radio waves. The sun is emitting a ton of like electromagnetic radiation. Which is interacting with our magnetic field, which is creating the Northern Lights. And that same thing that's making the Northern Lights is also. Creating currents in the ground. So you have these changes in magnetic field, which are, inducing currents in the ground, and the ratio between the two is gonna tell you about how well the ground is conducting electricity. Yeah. The

Alexis: 7:09

movement of it basically,

Zoe: 7:11

which is what we're trying to understand, is okay, are these rocks conducting electricity or are they not? Okay? So where the ratio comes in, Is if you have a large change of magnetic field and then you have a small current that is created by that large change, the ground is not conducting electricity very well. Because you have a large source. Yes. And then if like, no, I don't wanna, nothing's

Alexis: 7:34

coming back. Electricity. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Okay.

Zoe: 7:36

You know, you're pretty resistive versus if you have a large change of magnetic field and then you have a large electric field. Then you know that the ground is conducting electricity pretty well and maybe it's like some salty water or some clays, something

Alexis: 7:52

like that down there. Yeah. There's so many different things that can do that. Right. Then you're like open it up to like para or type right, or mythology. Oh, there's

Zoe: 7:59

tons of, yeah. Or structure. There's tons of things it could be, which is where. So my research is like specifically trying to combine different types of geophysics. Cool. To get a better picture of what's happening because. Like you said, it could be, there's like a long list of things that a conductor could be. Could be water, could be salty water, could be hot water, could be, some melts, some clays, it could be a large number of things. And so then when you're looking at. Using different methods. The MT says, it's conductive, so it could be anything. But then the seismic says, there's no water there. Yeah. So then you're like, okay, well that narrows it down.

Alexis: 8:39

Yeah. That pinpoints it a little bit. You're trying to cross reference almost with your research to be like, if you take these two models and combine it, or you get this data, you have a better idea of what's going on. Is that kind of the purpose of

Zoe: 8:49

it?

Alexis: 8:50

And I have a question there. When we talked about the change in magnetic field, is there a time based kind of signature of that?

Zoe: 8:58

Yeah, so, so when we put out these stations, we let them sit for usually a day, depending on what type of survey we're doing. And then we're measuring these changes. Over time and then, okay. Confusingly enough. So the frequency is what's gonna tell you about how deep you're looking. If you're looking at the high frequency data, it's gonna tell you about maybe like the first meters, 50 or a hundred meters. Yeah. Because the signals have all this energy that they're losing as they go down. And then when you look at like the low frequency stuff, Then, you know, you're preserving your energy longer. And you're looking deeper. So then when you're like looking at your frequency spectrum, it's telling you about essentially, it's like analogous to depth. Yeah. If that makes sense.

Alexis: 9:47

That's really, really cool. Yeah. You're getting so much information from it. It's a lot, a lot of information. Without seeing anything either. That's probably the coolest part is that it's so different than most data collection in geosciences where you're drilling and you're excavating and you're taking up rock to try to be like, okay, what's underneath this is all. Passive, almost like a passive collect, collect passive

Zoe: 10:10

collection of data. For seismic you have to have a source. Sometimes they're making like explosions or have like a fiber size truck or something like that. Versus ours we're just measuring naturally occurring radiation, which is pretty crazy. And then it also, it looks really deep, if you leave your station out for a week, sometimes depending on how resistive the ground is You can see up to like 200 kilometers. Wow. So

Alexis: 10:37

there's, that's cool. That's

Zoe: 10:39

fantastic. I mean, obviously like low resolution, but.

Alexis: 10:43

Still, it doesn't matter. I would be obsessed with that number and be like, whatever. We got to 188 kilometers. But that's mind

Zoe: 10:50

boggling. Yeah. They're like, we're looking at like the base of the crust. They use it to look at that, which is, that's

Alexis: 10:54

so crazy. Cool. How deep have you gone in one of your surveys?

Zoe: 10:58

For geothermal we are only really wondering about the first five kilometers. Okay. And then we might drill for one to two. So that's usually what. I'm looking at. Yeah. But for that Kimber light study that we were doing in Saskatchewan, basically you're looking cuz like diamonds come from the mantle. And so you're looking for basically where they're coming up into the bsphere, right?

Alexis: 11:21

That explosion. Yeah, exactly. That like huge, you can actually kind

Zoe: 11:24

of trace the. The light Kimber light's back, to where they come up. So, so

Alexis: 11:31

cool. That's pretty crazy. Yeah, that's absolutely fantastic. It's cool just to learn about it. I couldn't imagine to see it. I've never seen a Kimber light deposit in real life. I've just heard about it. You know what I mean? Yeah. So I would love to see that data and to be able to see the graph be like, yep, that's exactly where it came up. But that's also cool to know that geothermal is so surface based.

Zoe: 11:50

It's so expensive to drill that, a geothermal plant wouldn't be like, you could drill basically five kilometers anywhere and make a geothermal plant cuz of the geothermal gradient, you're increasing with depth. Just with heat. It's really expensive to drill. So then it's like how much energy are you actually getting out of it? Yeah. What's

Alexis: 12:08

worthwhile

Zoe: 12:09

for cost wise, like benefit analysis is usually you don't wanna go past, A couple kilometers usually.

Alexis: 12:15

Speaking on geothermal, I guess we already did a little bit of like how they're found, but like, cuz you use hydrogeology and thermodynamics, could you maybe just expand a little bit on like, how do you image them? How do you find them? What does it look like when you actually have found them? What are the indicators that you're like, yep, that's geothermal. And then how do you model it?

Zoe: 12:37

There's a few things you need for a geothermal system. It's pretty similar to like a hydrocarbon okay system where you want, you need prosy, you need permeability, and you need. Fluids the main thing is that when you're building a geothermal plant, you drill one hole, that's your injection. Well, you drill a second one. That's your, Your extraction. And so then essentially what you're doing is you're making a little circuit where you're pushing water in, it's transporting through a rock, and then you're sucking it up, on the other side of, essentially a reservoir. Very good. And then as the water's transporting through it, it's collecting heat from the surrounding area. And so, you need. Fluids pro, like pore space and the ability for the fluids to flow through it in order for you to actually get this cycle going. And that's like a traditional geothermal system. Sometimes they have a closed loop one, but they haven't made that commercial yet. So there's like lots of emerging kind of technologies. Very cool coming out. The traditional ones are like that. And then, for the system, like the kind of traditional system, which is one of the ones we're working on right now, is like, essentially you have a hot spring at the surface, so you're like, okay.

Alexis: 13:59

There's hot water here. There's hot water. Hot water,

Zoe: 14:02

right? And it's along a subduction zone. So you know that there's like lots of heat coming to the surface and you're essentially wondering, okay, where is this hot spring coming from? Because hot springs don't just like shoot up vertically. No, no. They kind meandering path. And so you're wondering, okay, like where did you start? Where's this guy coming from? If we were gonna drill a kilometer down, where's the heat source? That's what we're looking at. As far as exploration in Canada at the moment, a lot of people are actually looking at the Western Canadian sedimentary basin for, geothermal energy, and that's pretty different than having a heat source and a hot spring. You're basically looking at Going down based on the geothermal in gradient. And then you're trying to find areas that have, high sand beds, basically, which you can scan, like the surface to find out. And then there's tons of, well logs in alberta because of oil. One of the perks of that is that we already know a ton of information. About the Western Canadian sedimentary basin. It might not have as much, energy as, a traditional system with a volcano, but you have a lot less risk. Yes. And so then there's, it's easier to get. Investors and things like that. As opposed to just being like, oh, I'm gonna try to find like the source of this hot spring and directly into a volcano's ever drilled the well around here and you can't even see the fault because there's like glaciation and we're just going, we're

Alexis: 15:32

wing it and hopefully Yeah. If I got this straight, so the traditional is usually more like a hydrogeology and like a hot spring location volcano based. So you're actively trying to drill directly into that heat source, right? Because it's volcanic in origin, it's gonna be crazy structure controlled. It's gonna be hard to get to. There's just gonna be a high risk of trying to find it. And you're back to geology 1 0 1 of mapping risk to be like, do we actually know where this deposit is? And then in Alberta, because of there's a high amount of oil and gas, we have a bunch of well logs, we have a bunch of information available, and then we're going to use that to look at like porosity permeability in places that we can have like high heat flux. And that's because of the geothermal gradient. Could you explain what the geothermal gradient is to people who maybe don't know that? Because I think it's the second or third time we've mentioned it. What is that gradient?

Zoe: 16:26

So the geothermal gradient, if you can imagine the. Temperature and the ground is increasing everywhere, and the rate at which it's increasing is the geothermal gradient. And you can visualize that as being like, so in Canada, We all have basements. And the reason we have basements is because the ground never freezes because the ground is being heated actually. From Bernese. So if he were going to, I know a lot of people have probably never been in a mine, but one of the issues with going into a mine is that it's always hot down there. I've been in a potash mine in Saskatchewan in the dead of winter, and it was like minus 20. Outside, but then we went into the mine and it was like 35 degrees. With like a fan going all the time, like they were trying to cool it down. So if you can imagine that, the ground is always the deeper you go, the warmer you get, and it's pretty linear. So you could basically calculate, if I want a hundred degrees and the geothermal gradient is 30 degrees per kilometer.

Alexis: 17:31

You just plug in the math and you just have a

Zoe: 17:33

distance. You just it out. Yeah. Oh, I'm gonna have to go to three kilometers to get, you know what I want.

Alexis: 17:40

That's wonderful. It's an easy way, to look at it. It makes sense that you go the easy way other than going maybe for the gold of like the hottest possible

Zoe: 17:49

volcano. And then you're trying to find like, a fracture that's like transporting hot water from some. And the target is 200 meters across and you're go, you're drilling like a couple kilometers and versus in the sedimentary basin, it's all pretty, a bunch of nice flat layers and you're like, okay, just gotta go three kilometers down and I'm gonna hit this nice porous layer. And then there's gonna be, Warm water and it's all very, calculated.

Alexis: 18:19

Straightforward, it's something that probably you wouldn't expect. It's something that I didn't expect that. That's where geothermal was pushing in. Alberta was really like within, yeah, the Western Canadian sedimentary basin. I know a lot of Canadians and a lot of people in general are really excited about geothermal just because it's a renewable energy, it's a new source of green energy potentially. Where do you think the future of geothermal in Canada is headed and what's something that makes you excited about this sector? About the future of geothermal energy?

Zoe: 18:47

Geothermal in Canada is, It's not new. It sounds new, but we did try to get geothermal going in the energy crisis in the seventies and eighties. But it never really picked up. And I think now that we're trying to diversify our energy portfolio, I think it's a really, strong contender for, assisting oil and gas in producing electricity. Throughout Canada, especially, in Western Canada. A lot of places in Canada, which I'm really excited, for the prospect of geothermal is in the north where they do have a lot of issues with their energy security. And then having, geothermal, they may not have high enough temperatures to produce electricity, but to just heat their homes cuz a lot of those places use, Diesel to create electricity. Which then they use to heat. And if they could, miss that

Alexis: 19:39

step and

Zoe: 19:39

just go direct that's in the middle where they just go direct to, to heat their houses using geothermal. Even if they get water out, that's not even hot. You drill a well and then you have 10 or 20 degree water. If you're heating your house to 10 or 20 degrees from minus 40, then you could use like a space heater to heat your house to like a comfortable temperature. You would be saving a considerable amount of, power. So yeah, that's really cool. That's what I'm excited about for the future of geothermal. And that's fantastic. It's finally like graining traction, cuz I think there's, there are quite a few projects that are hopefully coming online in the next, five to 10 years.

Alexis: 20:20

I think what I didn't know that you just told me, and I just went right now, is that what's really cool about this geothermal. System is, it doesn't have to be perfect. And I think that's so different than most technology or most renewable energy that you think okay, it has to have perfect output and it has to be able to produce electricity. But then what you're saying is no, you can still use it. You can just use it for heat, for either thermodynamic like heat. Or bring you halfway there within a space heater I love that you can use it in tandem and it can get you maybe 30, 50, a hundred percent there, but you can still use it. I think that just blows open the doors of use cases that you could do with geothermal.

Zoe: 21:01

so for the power plants, those cases, they have to be more, perfect because you're putting energy into the grid. You have to sell it to an end user whatever, energy. Policy, et cetera. But I think where Geothermal's gonna really come in is heating those remote communities, which is, what we're trying to do in Vut, actually. So we're going up to Resolute Bay. I went last year actually just for a week, just to do a little bit of reconnaissance. Survey to collect a few data points to plan out our big survey that we're doing this summer. But we have two projects in Cambridge Bay and Resolute Bay. Two communities that are, they have to basically boat in diesel once a year. Wow. To. To heat and power their communities

Alexis: 21:51

for the entire year too, probably for the entire

Zoe: 21:53

year. That's hard. Have to buy an entire year's worth of supply. Whoa. And we're hoping that, so resley based on a little sedimentary basin, which is actually reasonably warm. So we're hoping that if we can get, I don't know, 20 or 30 degree. Yeah. Waters. We would be able to heat those houses and increase their quality of life. Yeah. Cause I think a lot of them, have, issues heating their homes, especially with this, you can imagine how expensive that is.

Alexis: 22:22

It should just be a right that your home is warm, especially in a place like Canada and in a place like none of it where it's freezing out. For like health and safety, you need to be able to have a warm house. So the fact that you could come into that community and do so much good just with geothermal and just using that natural gradient, that's fantastic. One thing that you mentioned there with your upcoming NuVet work is that you're, you did a quick reconnaissance survey and now you're doing a big survey. Your research is really heavily field-based. Could you explain what and how a field season works, what it entails? What is a survey? When you talk about, we're doing a survey, what does that actually look like? And then what are you responsible for when you're out there collecting data?

Zoe: 23:05

So we're in a weird situation as being. I think usually if you're in a commercial industry, there's only one geophysicist on your team. When you're collecting data versus when we're going to, Nunavut this year, it's gonna be like the entire team is geophysicists. Oh, wow. Which is an interesting thing. So then we all end up being just on an equal playing field. If you're in a commercial, survey, you'd be setting up a lot of stations and then just moving them along versus when you're in academia, we, we do a lot of planning for the surveys. And then we set them up and we do some testing and, it's a bit more laid back, but then we are also taking a lot more time to do QC on all of our Yeah. Data acquisition. Okay. So basically a survey. We're gonna ship all our equipment up to Resley Bay. And then we're gonna show up and our equipment's gonna be there and we're gonna charge some batteries and all that kind of stuff. And then we'll get up the next day and we'll go out and we have, three magnetometers per station. A real wire. And then four electrodes. We're gonna show up to our station. We have our central unit where we have to hook everything into. There's gonna be one person who's wiring everything up.

Alexis: 24:22

Okay. And then there's, that's connecting everything

Zoe: 24:24

together. Who's walking out, like a hundred meters north. And then dig a little hole, put an electrode in it, and then wire that up to the central unit. And then they're gonna go out. East, So you have basically three electrodes in the middle, and then one electrode north, one electrode east or west. And then we'll be putting these, magnetometers out as well. So they'll be, A third person usually sometimes a fourth. So now there's two people putting magnetometers out. Cause it'll take actually a lot of digging. And so then you have to dig a little trench to put your magnetometer in. And that also has to be oriented North Star correctly.

Alexis: 25:08

For those at home, what is a magnetometer? What does it look like?

Zoe: 25:14

The one we're using in the field, it is a giant tube. About the width of a can, and then it's. Like three feet tall. Oh, wow. It's big. So yeah, it's pretty big. And then the inside of it is literally just a big turn of wire. Cool. It's just a giant solenoid, right? Yeah. So it's just like a million turns coil wire, just all of it.

Alexis: 25:39

And then to get to that location, are you carrying all of those equipment? Are you mostly helicopter work? How does

Zoe: 25:46

that look? It's a lot of helicopter. We almost always, drive either that are helicopters, so Very cool. Cuz yeah, you're not carrying this equipment very far.

Alexis: 25:55

And how long do you leave it? Are you out in the field, living in the field for the entirety of the season? What is the length of the time that you usually leave your

Zoe: 26:04

equipment? So the equipment, so for, okay, so back to the survey. So we, we install this thing and we are gonna bring three of them. So usually one is always running, just like sometimes it's nice to have a backup. We wanna install three stations and then usually we just move two of them is what we do in a day. We'll get up, we will unearth one station, collect the data. Move it to a different place and then install it again. And then basically we'll be there for about two weeks. Just moving. Wow. Two stations a day. We're not even going very far, for the survey because we want it to be around the town. Okay. So we'll be just like around town, a little ways over, Oh, that's very nice. This room is gonna be pretty dense and we're just gonna be around. The locals will be like, oh, what's those guys again?

Alexis: 27:00

A hundred percent. They're gonna come up to you moving a little bit.

Zoe: 27:05

Everyone knows we're gonna be there cuz the town is like 200 people or something. So interestingly, some of the field work is pretty so urban. So in the Yukon when we were there, we were actually at Watson Lake, cuz Geothermals useless if. It's not like right next to a town.

Alexis: 27:21

You can't really

Zoe: 27:22

ported. We're just like hanging out in town, dropping around.

Alexis: 27:26

That's so funny. What the heck are these guys doing? Do people come and like talk to you?

Zoe: 27:32

Oh yeah.

Alexis: 27:33

Oh, I'm sure like, oh yeah, any, anyone who's over the age of 80 is probably in there, like a dirty sheet that's just what are you guys doing? Yeah.

Zoe: 27:42

Oh yeah, for sure. And especially like in smaller communities, they're like, what the heck? Oh, I love that. No one never goes down this road.

Alexis: 27:51

You're like, we do. And we're gonna be here for two weeks and just moving around this tube.

Zoe: 27:54

Usually when we drive to these locations, we have a truck that's like University of Alberta on the side. And that definitely helps. Most of the time people just come up because sometimes you, you see a random truck driving on the road and you're like, oh, what the heck? What are they doing here? And then you see it's like, oh, there's like a University of Alberta truck in the Yukon, and that's just. Another thing. Thank you so much for coming.

Alexis: 28:15

Yes. You're begging for attention questions and probably a couple like witty remarks, like a couple insults

Zoe: 28:24

headed your way. Oh yeah. I think you missed the turn or something and you're like, okay.

Alexis: 28:29

Some cheeseball remark that you're like, oh God, I wish I was back at Mount Meager. I wish no one was talking.

Zoe: 28:36

There's only a couple marts,

Alexis: 28:37

you know? Yeah. That's it. I'm in the middle of the mountain. Well, very, very cool. I, I think the, like fields work aspect is so different. So thank you so much for talking about like your research and how it works and how a field season works. We're gonna switch topics completely cuz we're now gonna go into something totally different, but you do. So much. I actually don't know how you do it this much, but you do a lot. And you're an active part of the community with E D I at the University of Alberta, specifically within the physics department, and I read online that it's the physicists for Justice, equity, diversity, and inclusivity. That's the committee. Could you kinda walk through what the committee does? What work do you do and what are some major kinda initiatives or changes that you're working on right now in the university?

Zoe: 29:29

It's a pretty just diverse group of people who want more diversity in physics and the main thing that we're working on at the moment is, what we call the climate survey. Okay. And basically we don't collect any demographic information as a university or a department. So it's really difficult to implement, policies to promote inclusion and diversity in within the department because we, physics is a very numbers based discipline as you can imagine. So when you're at a department meeting, you go, Hey, I think we need to like work on our, office culture. They go. You know, says you, I guess,

Alexis: 30:14

So we wanna come in with some numbers behind it. We wanna speak their language. Yeah. So,

Zoe: 30:20

so we did our second climate survey, so we're doing it every two years. Okay. And it's basically just a survey that's okay, getting some demographics, how many women do we have in the department? How many, you know, Probably physicians too. Queer department. Yeah. Racialized groups who identifies as a racialized group. Stuff like that. And then as well as just, do I feel welcome in the department? Have I experienced any offhand comments from, coworkers or professors about, things that make me uncomfortable? Was it directed at you or was it directed at someone else? That type of thing. To be able to actually, have numbers of, 20% of undergrads have experienced some sort of discrimination, due to their, being a minority. Yeah. Whether it's gender or otherwise. And then if we can see, a trend over the years, if we can collect this data once every two years. And to see if our initiatives are working or, if we can bring that data to the table and say, like this, we have a problem.

Alexis: 31:28

It's a shame that they need that data. Like it is shameful that, a department or a university is yeah, show us proof. Bet we don't believe you. Please come with numbers it's a shame that they put you in that position, but it's so wonderful that you're doing that survey and doing that culture report because it's important to have quantifiable numbers. So you could actually work and use the same language, like use what they use to be like, look, this is exactly what's happening within our department.

Zoe: 31:54

We're just hoping that we'll be able to, maybe, Use that to be part of some other initiatives that we have on the campus. Cool. They have some programs for hiring, like women as like lab assistants from, high school in order to inspire them. To get into physics and some other programs like that. So we're hoping that, this will be able to like, Kicks hurt. Others help lobbying power. Yeah, totally within the department. Otherwise, just providing a inclusive, space where people can feel comfortable.

Alexis: 32:32

It's really wonderful that you could then join in with other initiatives and use that data set as like a kickstart for bringing in other women. As lab assistance or to change the department to change the demographics. Zoe, that's fantastic.

Zoe: 32:45

It kind of came to us, like when we, so there's, the American Physical Association apa, I think. Okay. And they have like a. Once every two months, like workshop on E D I. And a lot of it is, American universities, talking and we're one of the only Canadian universities ago. Wow. And we were actually like just amazed at the amount of information that they have on their students. At American schools because they're trying to, push these initiatives. They are collecting a lot of demographic information, which does help At least reflect on, cuz you do have that kind of bias. Or at least I do, where you go into a room where there's 10% women. And because I'm so used to being the only woman, 1% woman, this is like

Alexis: 33:35

amazing. I do that too. I'm like, there's six of us.

Zoe: 33:40

And then I look, I actually do the numbers and I'm like, oh, there's actually there's three of us. Yeah. And there's 50 people in this room, without some actual data to back it up, it does. Feel like it's better than it is.

Alexis: 33:52

That's a really good point because I do think it is a university policy thing. I think in Canada, I don't think you can ask. I think it might be, no, you can't. I think it's illegal to ask. I think you can a, put in a, an optional area where people can self-disclose, but I think for the most part you can't. But I think you bring up a really good point about bias that I didn't even consider because I do the same thing. I'm guilty of it as well. If there's two of us in a room, I'm like, oh my goodness, this is the most equitable place I've ever been in my life. This is fantastic. Where you're right, it's nice to have that data set in the true data to be like, no, we're still 2% or less than 1%, or, The women that you're seeing are dropping off when we terms of PhD or postdoc or professors, right? So you could also do a demographic and position, argument. The data that y'all are collecting within the department I think is fantastic and it's just a really cool initiative. And then, just cuz we're almost at the top of the hour though, is. What are you most excited for? What are you working on right now?

Zoe: 34:53

Yeah, so I'm writing, a paper so a bit late maybe. Cuz I'm in my fourth year of my PhD and I'm writing my piece paper. That's ok. But I have a few that I need to actually just, I've procrastinated on it so long that I'm like, oh no. Now I have three papers I need to publish and I really don't want to. Anyway, so I'm just making. Figures and it's a good place to be in cuz I have a lot of really exciting stuff to share.

Alexis: 35:18

That's kind of part of the PhD. I could imagine. And when it is done, you let me know and then we'll put it on this podcast. We'll tag it to your episode and we'll put in your paper so people can read'em, because I'm excited to hear what you're gonna do. Not gonna understand half of it or be able to pronounce it. Be some nice figures. Okay, so you know what, I could look at a figure. I, I would love to look at a figure. Absolutely. Thank you Z for coming on. It's honestly, it's been such a pleasure. It was lovely to talk about your research field work, running around in your truck and also your E d I, and all the good that y'all are doing at the U University of Alberta within the physics department. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been an honor to have you on. Fabulous. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. Thank you guys for listening. This is Amoco podcast. Please tune in next week and join us we'll be back on Smoko.