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| Timothy Clough |
Timothy Clough, a Soil Scientist at Lincoln University,
was a 2000 Fulbright Senior Scholar based at the University of California,
Davis. He was engaged in experimental research on the movement and fate
of a greenhouse gas (nitrous oxide) in the sub-soil.
I'm from Lincoln University and I'm a soil scientist there
and what does the Fulbright award mean to me? Well the award gave me the
opportunity to go to UC Davis to study with an esteemed professor there
for four months and do a research experiment with him...
I had a somewhat inauspicious start to the trip. The day I was due to
leave the dog died, United Airlines rang up to cancel my flight and Air
New Zealand offered me another flight which included a twelve hour stopover
in Fiji with George Speight, but we finally got to Sacramento and just
hit that amazing Californian weather. It was 43 degrees, the end of a
heat wave.
So the first thing was to sort out the accommodation and Davis is a small
university town in comparison to the other major cities and accommodation's
at a real premium. They have a vacancy rate of about .3%... and you've
got to be there to get it on the day. So I opted to stay in a small rural
service town which is about twelve miles from Davis and this actually
turned out to be quite a good move because I stayed in a real American
home as opposed to a hostel.
I got round by using the local buses or biked the twelve miles to work...
Got to go some of the local baseball games, went to hear BB King play
at the local amphitheatre, joined the local gym and actually found something
about the history of this small town which was settled about 1880 with
some amazing architecture... It was a grant chance to find out something
about Mexican food and Mexican culture as well... I shared an office
with several post doctoral students, international visitors and they came
from places like Israel, Hungary and Denmark and just all round the world...
The award meant that I was able to devote myself to the experiment work
in conjunction with the professor who was my host... Being in Professor
Rolleston's lab it also provided me with exposure to his teaching
style, the American academic system, and interaction with other specialists...
They were just stretching the boundaries... I attended field days, local
trips and learnt something about the region's farming practices and
problems.... following on from the experimental work I went up to a national
soil science in Minneapolis and this was a chance to meet the gurus that
I've studied over the last ten years or so. Meet them in person,
and actually have some two way interaction with them and you find out
they're real people just like you...
So it's very hard to summarise what a Fulbright award has meant
because it's meant so much in many, many ways. It's a melting
pot of personal and professional experiences. You make friends. I've
seen a piece of a huge country that you know whose culture influences
the world. And I've made a lot of professional contacts that have
led to ongoing collaborative work now and in the future.
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| Hometown |
Christchurch, New Zealand |
| Award |
New Zealand Fulbright Fellowship
(formally the New Zealand Senior Scholar Award) (2000) |
| Research topic |
Soil Science |
| Place of study |
University of California - Davis,
California, USA |
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