The Earth Surface Processes Institute

The Earth Surface Processes Institute (ESPIn) is a six-day immersive training experience organized by CSDMS for 25 early career scientists, including 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.

ESPIn uses the CSDMS Ivy course material, with topics including:

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 Scientific Software Development

ESPIn kicks off with a big ideas, mini poster session: participants create a poster from two pieces of paper, one with research interests, the other with personal interests. This session helps participants introduce themselves and find shared interests.

ESPIn isn't just about instruction. Daily time blocks are dedicated to working in small, self-organized teams on a research, data analysis, and coding project. Participants can also work on developing and advancing their own research. Get a taste of past ESPIn team projects by checking out their webinars and labs.

ESPIn includes dedicated time for a local field trip, peer-to-peer networking, and professional development, including a carer panel.

ESPIn concludes with team project presentations, 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 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 travel to the U.S., 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, also at the CSDMS Integration Facility. CSDMS will cover costs of lodging, lunch, and the enrollment fee.

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

Important Dates

December 1: Application window opens
January 27: Application window closes
February 15: Notifications
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 science lecturers, but the ordering and duration of the lesson topics and team project development blocks are likely set.

Apply

To apply for ESPIn 2023, please fill out this Google Form (opens Dec 1, closes Jan 27).

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.).