Ben van Wyk de Vries is a professor at the Université Clermont Auvergne (UCA) in France (link: http://lmv.uca.fr/). His research focuses on volcanic hazards, including catastrophic collapses and avalanches of debris, tectonics of volcanoes, and monitoring surface deformation by videogrammetry and photo-digital imaging. He is also an advocate for geoheritage, and succeeded in convincing UNESCO to name the Chain des Puys volcanic mountain range in central France a World Heritage Site in 2014.
We were fortunate to visit with Ben during a recent natural hazards seminar in Uppsala, Sweden and ask him a few questions about his colourful career. We hope you enjoy getting to know him as much as we did!
VIPS team
Hi Ben, thanks for being the first in our interview series of established researchers. For the people out there who don’t know you yet, how would you introduce yourself?
Ben
I’m Ben. My surname is Van Wyk de Vries, which originally comes from Holland via South Africa. I was born in London. At the age of 22 after completing my undergraduate, I went to Nicaragua, Latin America, went native and I’ve continued going native ever since. I just recently became a native Frenchman. In the time in between, I studied geology. Although, I always wanted to be a geographer and work on glaciers, which I recently managed to do. But I’ve mostly worked on volcanoes and faults. And throughout my time in Latin America, I realized that you can’t do anything unless you work with people as well. So, that is another aspect of what I do, you might call it: social geology. That’s me!
VIPS
Great, thanks. What is your favourite volcano?
Ben
I don’t have a favourite volcano. There are just so many that I love. So, I would feel bad, claiming one is my favourite. Because you’d be letting down other ones.
VIPS
That was very diplomatically spoken. Ben, what is your main interest in research currently?
Ben
I’m trying to have a main interest so I don’t get too spread out. The main interest at the moment is working with geoheritage, which is the valuing, the protection, and the use of geological resources. That can be in all sorts of forms. I’m using that now to direct my research. Whatever comes up that is important in the geoheritage is where I end up doing my research today.
VIPS
What is or what are the favourite aspects of your research?
Ben
I think my favourite aspect of research…there are two: Number one, mixing with people and doing fun things, and two getting out and experiencing raw, rocky nature.
VIPS
Now let’s look back into your career in science, what are you proud of?
Ben
The work I did on gravity deformation of volcanoes is something I’m quite proud of because we started off with a lot of people not believing that it happened, especially in causing large avalanches. And now everybody believes it does. We sort of got away with it. And I’m not sure we got everything right.
VIPS
Do you consider that you’ve had a breakthrough point in your career?
Ben
Well, relating to that, yeah, there’s one that really stands out. And it’s not something that I said, but it’s something I’ve followed up on. We turned up at an avalanche in Nicaragua, at Las Isletas de Granada, a beautiful archipelago of islands below the Mombacho volcano. Peter Francis, who was my supervisor then, said to me “this looks just like Socompa volcano in the Andes- look, there’s lots of sediment in the avalanche.”, and that started a whole train of things going from there. It ended up in a Nature paper with him, and a whole load of other papers. And a lot of people not believing what we said.
VIPS
Ben, what changed or improved during your career in science?
Ben
Well… now I think the most obvious one is the informatics revolution. Of course, when I started out, we were using paper and pens. We were still at the stage where we were typing on typewriters, especially in places like Nicaragua, which didn’t have computers at that time. In fact, it is difficult to imagine how we could have done anything in the past, without all that. It’s difficult to think of yourself going back.
VIPS
What was your motivation to start your career? And did you always see yourself in academia?
Ben
No, I haven’t always been in academia. I’ve worked for BP, I’ve worked for UNOCAL Geothermal exploration, I’ve done a bit of gold exploration. I almost ended up in a company specializing in risk some time ago. And I’m occasionally dabbling with the economic side, but I can’t talk about that because it’s secret. However, when I was little I fell in love with Norway, its mountains. I always wanted to do something out in the wild. Gradually, the options closed for me and I ended up being a geologist.
VIPS
From what you said you changed directions in your career quite a bit. That might be interesting for the early career scientists reading our blog—did you encounter major setbacks in your career? How did you overcome these?
Ben
Well yes, I encountered quite a lot of setbacks. Some of them produced by myself, and some of them produced by being rejected (the things for which you always blame the other people because it’s not your fault, you are always brilliant). And I think I got through them by being resilient, having more than one option, and always having a get out. I guess the first problem was actually getting into university, because I failed my school exams.
VIPS
Oh really?
Ben
Yeah, there’s a good club of people who fail first and then get scraped through. I did really well at university, but not absolutely brilliantly. Straight after university, I didn’t try and get a PhD or anything, I just went off to Nicaragua, and started doing stuff. So, I didn’t take a normal career path. And I didn’t actually have any particular idea of what I was going to do, but just went and did it. And then when I wanted to do a PhD, I decided not to do anybody else’s PhD, but the one I wanted to do. It was very difficult to get funding; a) because I wasn’t one of the top students who would normally get that sort of thing, and b) I was choosing to do something that people didn’t quite understand the science behind, what it was good for, and in a place that was politically inappropriate at that time. It was like trying to do something in Iran or North Korea now, for example. And then after the PhD, yeah, there’s probably five or ten failed postdoc applications, job applications, more than ten along the way. But I always had something else to take me through. So, I could go into industry. I did other things. And I wasn’t actually sure that I wanted to continue in academia either. So, it was sort of by accident.
VIPS
So why did you go to Nicaragua?
Ben
When I was at university in London, undergraduate, I met a Nicaraguan girl. And well, things didn’t really work out with her, but she got us interested in Latin America, opened our minds a bit. So, with several friends, we decided to go and travel in Latin America. To get there, we all did it in different ways. I decided to do a geological expedition. I got money from the Royal Geographical Society, the Geological Society of London, my old boys club, etc. And all my other fellows did it in different ways. And some of them ended up meeting up, but I ended up in Nicaragua doing projects on the volcano. And when I first met the volcanoes, I didn’t really look back.
VIPS
Coming back to nowadays, what is the best thing about the academic workplace?
Ben
The best thing is the freedom to do what you want, to not have a boss that tells you what to do.
VIPS
And how would you change it if you could?
Ben
The problem in academia is that it’s isolated from the real world. And people tend to get into small groups and end up fighting over nothing. And it can get incredibly vicious. And they can tend to get extremely conservative about what they’re doing, what is around them and try to avoid anything changing. And that has been especially the case where I am at the moment. And there’s a flip side to it as well: it’s schizophrenia, because there’s also the freedom, the ability of people to think out of the box and to do things. So it’s a difficult situation, in that sense.
VIPS
Okay, our final question is: what advice would you give to an early career researcher in geoscience?
Ben
Get as many options open as you can. Because going academic has very few jobs. And there’s a load of other things to do out there, which are equally as good, if not better. And if you have a range of options, and a range of skills, it means academia is much easier. You’re not trapped. You can do what you like, you can always get out. [Regarding work/life balance,] you really have to compartmentalize. And it takes time to learn that. So for example, this morning, I woke up early and I went out and I ran and walked around, and I didn’t think of work at all. I mean, I was seeing rocks and things like that, but it wasn’t in the work environment. And when I go home on Sunday, I will switch off and not think about it. Always keep stuff outside. And just remember that actually, most of the stuff you do doesn’t really matter, in the big scheme of things. It doesn’t matter to you. It probably doesn’t matter most other people either. You’re doing it because it’s fun. And if it’s not fun, then you don’t have to do it.
VIPS
Thank you for your time.
Ben
Pleasure.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
You can contact Ben via email at ben.vanwyk@uca.fr with any inquiries about his work.
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