Exclusive interview: Ulrich Kueppers

VIPS team

First we ask you to introduce yourself to people who don’t know you yet, so can you give us a short introduction with who you are and what you’re doing?

Ulli

Hello everyone, my name is Ulrich Küppers. Most people probably know me by Ulli. I am a geologist by education, worked as an engineering geologist for one year and did my PhD in volcanology. I’m a permanent staff member at LMU Munich in Germany. Besides teaching and bureaucracy, I am working as a volcanologist in the field and in the laboratory.

VIPS team

Working as a volcanologist, this question should be easy to answer: What is your favourite volcano?

Ulli 

Clear answer: Stromboli.

VIPS team

Where lies your current, main interest in research?

Ulli 

My interest lies in explosive volcanism, and trying to understand: What is happening? Where? Why? When? How efficiently? And how fast? I want to understand quantitatively the breakup of magma into pyroclasts of different sizes, the dispersion of which is influenced by various different processes and conditions.

VIPS team

What is your favourite aspect of your research?

Ulli 

It’s a combination of curiosity and loving nature, and loving to be in nature and observing nature. It’s the curiosity of trying to decipher what is happening inside a volcano, where we will probably never be able to be directly when a volcano is erupting. Thus, trying to better understand what a volcano is doing based on what is injected into the atmosphere and how.

VIPS team

Why is your research relevant?

Ulli 

Exploding volcanoes pose threats to a lot of human beings, as well as infrastructure, and it may have negative climatic impacts. I think there’s plenty of reasons why we should study erupting volcanoes. Explosively erupting volcanoes have a high potential to harm large areas and significant amounts of people. On top of that, for several reasons, we cannot relocate hundreds of thousands of people for a significant amount of time. Hence, we have to deal with a natural process that will interact with human beings. In light of this, I hope that studying volcanoes in the field and in the laboratory will contribute in the long run to a better assessment of volcanic hazards.

VIPS team

What would you consider your biggest academic achievement?

Ulli 

That’s a funny question. That’s more a question that you should ask other people… 🙂

VIPS team

Well, we have an alternative question then: What gave you the most fun?

Ulli 

Okay. What gave me the most fun?! I am bringing students to the field every year, 3 trips of five weeks in total. Plus advising students, postdocs, PhD students, doing fieldwork. I greatly enjoy working together with colleagues in the field and discussing an outcrop in front of us. What else gives me most fun?! I think field work is the BEST! Lab work can sometimes be boring as you’re repeating conditions in order to try and have a statistically relevant amount of numbers to have an empirical finding. However, it’s surely an important and necessary contribution. Fun is… I was the PI of a European research project that was educating 13 early stage researchers (ECRs). That was not only fun, it was very demanding. But it was great to see how those young people evolved and developed as scientists. It is interesting to see the paths they are taking now afterwards, like staying in academia, or going into what is called the private sector, or different forms of careers altogether.

VIPS team

Ulli, what was your motivation to start your career in science? Did you always see yourself in science?

Ulli 

Clear answer is no.

VIPS team

So why did you end up in science?

Ulli 

When I finished high school, the only thing I thought I knew for sure is that I didn’t want to continue in in academia and start at University. So I did my civil service (at the time young men in Germany could choose it as an alternative to the then obligatory military service). During that, I basically tried to find my own way. Thus, I ended up studying geosciences – geology. I liked it a lot! And I realized within the broad field of geoscience, it is volcanoes that are most intriguing to me. After graduating, I worked first as an engineering geologist in a private office in Bavaria. However, I quit the permanent position there, to then go back into academia, because engineering geology was not a perfect match for Ulli in the long run. So, I quit that position, went back into academia and started a PhD in volcanology. It was the combination of scientific curiosity, active nature, and the active natural processes that intrigued me to go back. That’s why I’m here.

VIPS team

Very mixed career, definitely not a straight path!

Ulli 

Absolutely not! I remember when I finished high school back in 1992, in my last year of school, Pinatubo was erupting. I remember having heard about this in the news, and I remember not bothering a lot about it. It was really not that I grew up saying: “I want to be a volcanologist” like some people would say: “I want to be a fireperson or a doctor”. I clearly did not see myself in that direction until the second year of university.

VIPS team

Did you have any major setbacks during your career? And how did you grow out of that?

Ulli 

I had one personal crisis during my PhD, which was not science related, but it was because my sister died. So that took me out for like a year. I mean, I was really unfocused and didn’t perform well. How did I grow out of this? With the help of my family and friends…

VIPS team

Understandable, I am sorry for your loss. But you succeeded in getting your degree! What did you do afterwards?

Ulli 

After finishing university, I wanted to continue in, let’s call it volcanology. I had contacted a couple of observatories, mainly to become an intern and work there, but nothing worked out. This is how I ended up in the engineering office in Bavaria, which was a good experience. It kind of reinforced my thinking in which topic in geoscience could be the topic for me. That shaped Ulli into volcanology. When I finished my PhD in Munich, I was looking for postdocs. I was offered a postdoc in Mexico, but I couldn’t accept it, because my degree in Germany, was not ready in time. I basically had to refuse to accept it. Then I had a couple of other applications. One was very promising, but it turned out that the position would not have been filled for another five years. So it was good that it was never offered to me. I then also applied to a position in the Azores. I didn’t hear from them for six months. Finally, they came back to me four weeks prior to the expected starting date, just when I came back from holidays, on Etna. So eventually, I went to the Azores, but not as early as they wanted me to start and it was a great experience to have been there.

VIPS team

Coming back to your workplace here at LMU. What is the best thing about your academic workplace?

Ulli 

Well, personally, Munich is close to the Alps and I like hiking. From a scientific aspect in Munich, we have a large set of experimental facilities that allow us to investigate, approach or tackle many different questions. Because of my job as a permanent researcher, and not as a professor, I have more time for research and not too much time I need to spend on administration or politics. Which I am very happy about! So again, besides my time in the lab, with or without students, I have a lot of time that I’m bringing students, PhD students or postdocs to the field for fieldwork, observing volcanoes or working on deposits. It’s really the mix of experimental studies and field studies that allow me to go out of the lab for many weeks a year, and then work for many months here in the lab. It’s that combination that I really appreciate here in Munich. Maybe one more thing to add. Munich is a very international working group. There are a lot of colleagues with very diverse backgrounds that are coming to Munich. We have a lot of international masters students, and obviously PhDs and postdocs. In terms of the nationalities, the Germans are the minority in our group. And, again, that allows us to get to know many people with different backgrounds from different countries, and see the problems and celebrate the various occasions in all those countries.

VIPS team

Yeah, you are indeed a super diverse and international group here in Munich. It was great to see. Last question: what advice would you give to an early career scientist who aspires for a career in volcanic research? And, how would you tell them to maintain a good work-life balance?

Ulli 

First and foremost, do what you like! Try to do everything possible so that you can, from your perspective, be the one that is picked for a certain position in the future. Thus, in terms of work and life balance, this sometimes necessarily implies that you don’t have a nine to five job every week. That is the brutal truth. I had a permanent position in Bavaria as an engineering geologist, and I hated the job. I think it’s honest to say it that way. So what did I do? I quit my permanent position to enrol in a three year PhD position about volcanoes at a university in Bavaria, where in Germany, we may have one volcanic area that is active. So the question could have been: why do you study volcanoes in Germany, and so on, so on. Clearly, the future career perspectives were… limited, let’s say it that way. I personally think a career in academia necessarily implies that you are ready, at least for some years, to move to other places, to other institutions. It may sometimes not be easy to move away from your family, but it clearly gives you an invaluable experience when it comes to the broad scientific education that exists outside your home University. When you leave your home University, you will probably have a couple of points that you like, and that you hate about that university or that country. When you go to another university and/or country, you will realize that some of the points you used to hate from the place where you just came from, are now super compared to the conditions at the other place or in the other country. Open your mind and try to follow your dream topic. Go for it! Try it! But, I mean, I don’t want to be pessimistic…However, every career is like a funnel, right? There’s a lot of people starting a certain topic, and not everybody of those will succeed in getting a position. That is true for a career as a mechanic, a plumber, a professor and a doctor, anything. So, willing to become a researcher with a job sometimes, undoubtedly will ask you to work extra hours. I think that’s a fact we have to deal with. But again, I don’t think that is a fact limited to academia only. That is a fact for many careers out there. How to find the good work-life balance? There is not THE perfect work life balance, that’s essentially up to every individual. For example, when you are looking for a postdoc your partner may not want to join…it is not easy! There is no general answer to that problem. It is something that one person for him/herself or together with a partner have to find a solution for.

VIPS team

Thanks a lot, Ulli.