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 sheets 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.

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

ESPIn 2023

CSDMS is excited to announce that ESPIn 2023 will be held May 8-15 at the Sustainability, Energy and Environment Community (SEEC) facility on the CU Boulder East Campus.

Participant costs (reimbursement for transportation cost up to $500, enrollment, accommodations at the Millennium Harvest House Hotel, 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, also at SEEC. Continued lodging support will be provided from Monday, May 15th to Thursday, May 18th, breakfast and lunch each day will be provided, and your meeting registration fee of $300 will be reimbursed after the meeting.

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 may change slightly as we secure guest science lecturers and career panelists, 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).

For your application, please prepare one PDF document 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 programming languages and development tools do you use? What do you want to learn?
Diversity statement (150 words max). Explain any past or present activities that have contributed to increasing diversity, and describe how you envision your future work to contribute to increasing diversity.
Resume (half a page max). Be sure to list your proficiency with programming and model development.

Applications will be evaluated on a 10-point scale based on:

scientific motivation, relevance of research interests/goals, disciplinary background, and career stage (3 pts);
programming experience and motivation to ramp up skills (3 pts);
diversity statement (3 pts).