(upbeat music)
- I come from Belgrade, Serbia.
And at Belgrade University,
I did undergrad and Master's in geology,
specifically, tectonics
and structural geology.
During high school even,
and during undergrad and Master's,
I was involved with this meteor group
that was observing meteors,
but basically we went camping
and looking at the sky.
(Andrea chuckles)
And we were taking notes about light
and brightness of meteor
and stuff like that.
And when the time came to choose PhD,
I was, why would I limit
myself only on Earth
when I can combine what I like to do?
And that's how I was pretty sure
that I wanna do planetary.
I just needed to find where I can do it.
And then this position occurred.
And I thought it's
perfect (Andrea laughs).
Basically, what we do here in the group
is stuff that is not very explored.
So it's all very new.
And I mean, I guess everyone do PhD,
but not everyone has this
challenging questions
that nobody knows anything about.
So we are exploring together
and sometimes you can
not do it and go to sleep
(Andrea laughs)
because all these
questions are in your head.
(upbeat music)
My work is mainly focused on programming.
So in my PhD, I use iSALE-2D
shock physics hydro code
for making simulations of impacts
that are happening on Mars,
and for analyzing data that
I gained from simulations,
and I write final scripts.
So I use Python.
Once you learn programming
and the way to think
like a programmer, you can
program basically anything.
So, no matter where my path leads me,
I can, all this set of
skills that I learned here,
how to write, how to
think like a scientist
and how to use all this computers
and programming languages
will definitely, I mean, help in general,
whatever I choose to do afterwards.
(upbeat music)
iSALE, is a awesome code
that can do a lot of physics
at the same time.
But to calculate all these equations,
it needs a lot of time.
So for example, one impact
it happens in few seconds.
It hits the planet and
then change all the rocks
and metamorphose them.
It makes all the dust, all
the fires and stuff like that.
But to make one impact on the computer,
it takes sometimes up
to two or three months,
depending on how big the impact is,
because computer need to
calculate all of these equations.
In future, super-computing
and parallelization
of these codes will help a lot,
because then we could run
codes on multiple cores
on supercomputers and stuff like that.
And waiting for three months
for one simulation to end will
be probably three minutes.
(Andrea laughs)
(upbeat music)
Sometimes I wish I can
go away and hug myself
and tell myself that everything
is gonna be all right,
and just believe more in yourself,
because sometimes we search
for support from surrounding.
And the only thing is just
to believe in yourself,
no matter where you are.
Sometimes you need to move
half-way across the planet
and live all by yourself, basically.
And who's gonna support you then?
But then, you come to the best
group in Southern hemisphere
and you get all the support.
(Andrea chuckles)
(upbeat music)
Just stay open-minded for
all the opportunities,
and for all the things you wanna learn,
people will say that
somethings is not useful,
don't think like that
because things change so much
that we cannot, the human
brain cannot even perceive it.
So something that is popular now,
won't be popular in four years time.
So just stay open-minded and
learn as much as you can.
(upbeat music)
