David Groenewald is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institut Català de Paleontología Miquel Crusafont. When he was a training staff at the Evolutionary Studies Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, he visited the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona in Summer 2022.
“During my visit I met with and established new connections, as well as improved existing ones, with staff and students from Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont, the Geology Department at UAB, and from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona.
I learned how to use several new software products to carry out different analyses on 3D data. These skills are highly transferable and are useful for my current as well as future research projects. Furthermore, I was introduced to techniques from engineering that are very different from my background (biology and paleontology), but which highlight how analytical techniques from one research area can be applied to help answer questions in another. The visit allowed me to explore a different area of research than what I would traditionally look at. During my visit, I also had the opportunity to join the team to look for fossils in Permian-Triassic aged rocks in the Pyrenees.”
His stay in Spain was an interesting and enriching experience for him, both personally and professionally: “I would definitely recommend the Erasmus+ mobility to others. The experience was more than just academic as it includes traveling to a different country and experiencing a culture, language, and cuisine that is very different from what one is used to.”