Hello! My name is Celina Dugulin, I am the Early Stage Researcher #4 and I am currently doing my PhD at the beautiful University of Nottingham.
If I was to sum up this year with just one word it would have to be ‘exciting’. In 2016, I finished my Master’s degree at the University of Vienna. Without doing any statistics or surveys I can tell you that I belonged to the majority of graduates having that quarter-life crisis asking ‘what should I do with my life? I wanted to live abroad, earn money, but most importantly work on a project that I could get excited about. Now, and already six months in Nottingham, I have been to Poland and Germany for training courses achieving everything what I wished for in this new chapter in my life.
About my PhD work
Initially my PhD was dominated by reading and summarizing as much as possible about the topic in order to set up my first experiments. So as you can imagine I thrilled to finally start in the lab undertaking the preliminary experiments with green malt. What excites me the most about my project is, the aim of reducing the energy inputs required for malting. Maltsters solely in the UK produce around 1.5 million tons of malt per year, leading to a CO2 emissions of around 340,000 tonnes per annum and an energy consumption of around 1375 GWh (CarbonTrust, 2011)! The thought of just being a tiny part in helping to make the malting process more energy/water efficient and figuring out alternative practical environmental options brings me joy.
How it began?
It took some time to sink in that I was a part of this huge EJDFoodSci project, and there wasn’t enough time to be nervous. It first hit me when I was waiting in front of the Bioenergy and Brewing Science building, Wednesday 1st of March, just 3 weeks after being accepted for the project. Upon arrival I received a warm welcome and for that I was very grateful and ready to start my new job.
Brewing…
I cannot wait to brew the first batch of beer with green malt and letting you know how it tasted. It is hard to express in words how excited I am about the next EJD adventures, the next adventure being my secondment at the KU Leuven and sharing this experience with my new colleagues and friends.
English pubs!
With any free time I endeavour to explore as many different English pubs, and try as many different beer styles as possible (some a lot better than others), this is the real adventure for an Austrian lager beer loving girl. I’ve taken on this selfless task in an effort to figure out which are the best bars in Nottingham for my EJD fellows! ☺
