Early Career Researcher (ECR) of the Month (February 2025) - Jan Sodoge
By Lou Brett, University of Strathclyde
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Our Early Career Researcher (ECR) of the Month of February 2025 is Jan Sodoge!
Jan is a trained computational social scientist that recently earned his PhD, and is now a postdoctoral researcher, at Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Germany. During his PhD Jan developed a text-mining approach that extracts the socio-economic impacts of droughts from a large corpus of newspaper articles. Via this approach, he obtained a comprehensive dataset covering various impacts in Germany since 2000 on a district level. In consequent work, this helped Jan to understand how the recent multi-year drought in Germany from 2018-2022 was unique from an impacts perspective and how, for example, heat events affected impacts during this period.
Additionally, text-mining helps Jan to understand more indirect impacts, such as mapping groundwater-related conflicts. He complemented this work with participatory research that leveraged stakeholder expertise to qualitatively model the cascading impacts of droughts across sectors. In the future, Jan would like to link these two streams of research. Besides his work on impacts, Jan is also very curious about leveraging text-as-data and machine learning to foster interdisciplinary research by developing recommendation systems for academic conferences such as EGU.
Beyond professional interests, Jan enjoys running, road cycling, chess & coffee (an excellent range of activities)!
If you are interested in reading more about Jan’s research, please find his recent article below:
https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-24-1757-2024
Thanks for reading!
CompoundNET.