Wednesday, September 15, 2010

LCA Training & Research Workshop

I was in Pattaya during the last 10 days to attend a 5-day training on Life Cycle Assessment and another 5 days before and after the training for a research workshop with the SEAT research project team.

LCA is one of the work packages in our interdisciplinary research project. The training was given by the LCA experts from CML, University of Leiden, who are one of our project partners. There were about 30 participants from project partner organisations, namely Bangladesh Agricultural University, University of Bergen-Belgium, Shanghai Ocean University-China, University of Copenhagen-Denmark, WorldFish Center-Malaysia, Wageningen University-Netherlands, Kasetsart University-Thailand, University of Stirling-Scotland UK, and Cantho University-Vietnam.

The research workshop before the training was more on the refining of our first paper as part of the requirements for the PhD programme at U of Stirling, and thinking of the second paper, as well as the framework of our research for the coming years. During the training period itself I was spending 4-5 hours/night to also work on this, especially on the comments of my supervisors for paper revision. And I am still working on it. I just got too tired and too sleepy at the end of the week that I had to really get some sleep or else I would have collapsed.  Thank God for His strength and provision of Bio C and Intra!

The other research workshop after the training was more on the baseline survey which the whole project would be conducting in each country (Bangladesh, China, Thailand, Vietnam) on October to November. There are still many issues related to the joint questionnaire, as all the work packages had to incorporate their questions, thus there is a need to go through the questions to make sure they are relevant, sensible, realistic, and of good quality. We had exercises on translating them into the local languages, then translating them back into English, to ensure understanding. We also practiced working on the Access database to familiarise ourselves with data handling once survey work has started.

All in all, it was a very interesting time for me, I hope for everyone as well, learning new things from both the training and the workshop. It was also a challenging time, trying to think of how the tools learned can be integrated with my background in aquaculture, at the same time how I can specifically incorporate the tools learned in my own research.



Some members of the SEAT Research Team (Photo: by Pich)