So a few months back we were contacted by Marine Duperat a PhD candidate from Quebec working in Forest Sciences to commission a comic to go in her thesis.

Marine went on to describe her life in the world of Forest Research and listed all the things she thought were worth a comic:

We lost an incredible amount of stuff in the deep snow cover

Snow was always falling from the trees on our head.

Squirrels were eating our wires

Our strain gauges (on the tree) ended up covered of ice…

A porcupine ate the wood panel (and pooped on it ….)

We had a hard time making work the experiment, it was always failing and the datalogger (in the box on the wood panel) was always giving “NaN NaN NaN” instead of data.

Obviously this was too amazing a list of brilliant craziness for us to miss the chance of cartooning so we agreed and got hard to work and after a few weeks back and forth we made Marine this cartoon to help any readers of her thesis understand the troubles she had in producing it.

We are very pleased to add that Marine successful defended her thesis and is as of 2 weeks ago, Dr Marine Duperat.

Her thesis title is “Effet de l’hétérogénéité du peuplement sur les charges imposées par le vent” which in english roughly translates as “Effect of stand heterogeneity on wind loads”.

If you’d like to read more about her actual research into the effect of wind on trees and what she amazing work she has produced despite everything that happened in the comic then please go read more about her work at the links below

Marine Duperat on Google Scholar or Research Gate

Or drop her a line on twitter and I’m sure she’d be happy to talk either wind loads or tips for squirrels proofing.

@MauditChablis

And finally, if you want your own cartoon for your thesis then drop us a line, we’re always happy to consider commissions.

Update: You can now go read Dr Duperat’s thesis at this link http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11794/69589 and you totally should 🙂


0 Comments

Leave a Reply

%d bloggers like this: