The Earth Surface Processes Institute

The Earth Surface Processes Institute (ESPIn) is a six-day immersive training experience held by CSDMS for 25 early career scientists: graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, researchers, and faculty. ESPIn is designed to help participants make advances in earth and planetary surface processes research by teaching cyberinfrastructure skills in numerical modeling, best programming practices, open source software development, and collaborative coding. A mix of experienced scientists, visiting faculty, and research software engineers provide instruction.

ESPIn is a combination of learning and doing.

Course topics include:

Project Jupyter
Introduction to the Shell
Text Editors and Development Environments
The Anaconda Distribution
Introduction to Version Control with Git and GitHub
Basics of Python Programming
Python Programming for ESP Scientists
Landlab
The Permamodel Toolkit
The Basic Model Interface
The Python Modeling Toolkit
High-Performance Computing
Best Practices in Software Development

ESPIn kicks off with 'big idea' poster presentations of participants---these help with forming small teams interested in similar topics. Several days will be dedicated to working in small teams on a research, data analysis, and coding project. Participants can also work on developing and advancing their own research codes. Get a taste of the ESPIn team projects by checking out webinars and labs. In addition, there will be dedicated time for a local field trip, peer-to-peer networking, and professional development. ESPIn concludes with presentations on team projects, which set up participants to continue to develop ideas.

ESPIn 2023

CSDMS is excited to announce that ESPIn 2023 will be held May 8-15 at the CSDMS Integration Facility in beautiful Boulder, Colorado.

Participant costs (transportation to and from Boulder from within the U.S., enrollment, accommodation based on shared rooms, breakfast and lunch on teaching days) are supported for 25 participants by CSDMS. Applicants are responsible for dinners, and all other incidental expenses.

All applicants selected for ESPIn 2023 are also expected to attend the 2023 CSDMS Annual Meeting, held the following week, May 16-18. CSDMS will cover costs of lodging, dinner, lunch and the enrollment fee.

For questions regarding ESPIn, contact us at csdms@colorado.edu.

Important Dates

December XXX: Application window opens
January XXX: Application window closes
February XXX: Notification
May 8-15: ESPIn 2023
May 16-18: 2023 CSDMS Annual Meeting

Agenda

The preliminary agenda for ESPIn 2023 can be found here. This agenda will change slightly as we secure guest lecturers, but the ordering and duration of the lesson topics has remained fairly constant over the years.

Apply

To apply, please fill out this Google Form (opens Dec XXX, closes Jan XXX).

Prepare one document as a PDF containing the following sections:

Motivation statement (250 words max). Why are you interested in earth surface process modeling? What research questions are you working on? Does your research involve modeling? What experience do you have in numerical modeling and data analysis? What models or programming languages and skills do you already know? What do you want to learn?
Statement on how your participation contributes to diversity and inclusion (150 words max). In your statement you can possibly explain how you contributed to diversity in the past and how you envision your future science or coding skills to contribute to diversity.
Short Resume (half a page max). Be sure to list your proficiency with coding and model development

Applications will be evaluated based on: (i) scientific motivation, relevance of research interests and goals, diversity of disciplinary backgrounds and career stage (3pts.) (ii) coding experience or your motivation to ramp up coding skills (3pts.) (iii) your diversity statement (3pts.).

For questions regarding CSDMS Spring School application and general info, contact us at: csdms@colorado.edu