ESPIn
The Earth Surface Processes Institute (ESPIn) is a six-day immersive training experience for 25 early career scientists, including graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, researchers, and faculty. ESPIn is designed to help participants advance their research in earth and planetary surface processes by teaching skills in numerical modeling; in modern, collaborative, scientific software development; and in the use of open source community cyberinfrastructure. 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
- Python for Modeling
- 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 career 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@colorado.edu.
ESPIn 2026
ESPIn 2026 will be held in the summer of 2026 at the Sustainability, Energy and Environment Community (SEEC) facility on the CU Boulder East Campus. Updates will be posted here when the dates are confirmed.
