For my first blog I figured it would be the most logical to start off by giving a brief intro about myself and then follow up with the plans that I have for this blog page.

Creating a personal website/blog page appears to be a common practice for PhD students for one reason or another. As I come to the end of my first year as a PhD student, I thought it was about time I jumped onto the bandwagon and start blogging about my adventures as a geologist!

Who is the Volcano Guy?

The name for this blog page comes from my Twitter handle (@The_Volcano_Guy), in truth, my name is Ed McGowan, a PhD student at the University of Leicester. My research project is focussing on ancient caldera-forming volcanoes that erupted nearly half a billion years ago in the English Lake District. Through a combination of fieldwork and geochemical analysis, I hope to shed light on key details about these catastrophic eruptions and take this new information to more modern, active volcanoes across the globe.

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When I’m not spending my time on long extinct volcanoes, I am instead spending it looking at virtual ones. As a long time video gamer, I have recently paired this passion with my other rocky interest and look at how accurately geological principles are portrayed in popular commercial video games (Pokemon, Legend of Zelda, Spyro etc). Together, with another fellow video gaming volcanologist, Jazmin Scarlett, we play through game after game with our scientific thinking caps on. Each game receives a full review posted on Jazmin’s blog (check them out if you haven’t already). Although this started off as more of a fun hobby, it has since snowballed into a fully fledged research project, with one paper published and plenty more in the pipeline.

Blog Contents

Obviously a vast majority of my blogs will about my PhD and video game work. I often found myself thinking about what I could write about while hiking up a mountain or crushing my samples at uni.

The PhD related blogs will largely cover what I am up to at the time, whether that is planning field trips or explaining analytical techniques that I am using. Alongside these, I also want to write about ‘tips and tricks’ for those considering taking the PhD path as well. These will include things that I wish I knew at the time, like how to boost your application, feedback I received after failed interviews and how I keep all my data organised.

For now I will be keeping my formal volcanic video game reviews on Jaz’s Volcanic Videogame Inventory blog page. However, I will include other geological game reviews, as well as outreach projects and general ramblings about virtual geo-learning on here. I have no doubt other stories will show up depending on what I am up to or what pops up in my head as it wonders.

Overall, I hope this is going to be a fun and exciting adventure! 🙂