"The concept of modelling and modelling a concept" by Professor Dr. Hemin Koyi,  Khalifa University Abu Dhabi

About the Speaker:

Hemin Koyi is a native Kurd, a naturalized Swede and a structural geologist by profession the "most common combination". His journey includes a graduation from Uppsala University with stops in Austin, Paris and Beijing. Since August he is in Abu Dhabi, at Khalifa University's Earth Science Department. Through his profession, Hemin has repeatedly fallen in love with nature in different places on the globe, and kept his promise to her. He has chosen structural geology as his science path simply because the topic is easy to grasp and it makes him think beyond his lifetime. He speaks a couple of languages including that of rocks. And he likes modelling because he is impatient and can’t wait a couple of million years to see a structure evolve.

About the talk: 

In our daily life, we use observations to understand what happens around us from simple things like accidentally dropping a plate when it is wet and slippery to more complex features of our planet. Part of this understanding relies very much on linking observation with our background knowledge of forces and rules (and emotions in some cases) to build a model which both satisfies the observations and obeys the rules of the “game”. In my presentation, I will try to demonstrate how we can use simple models to understand less obvious features and take this idea one step forward to translate observation to interpretation and understanding of the features we try to study. I will run few experiments in my presentation and look forward to your participation and help to understand their results.