Doctoral School of Geosciences

At the Doctoral School of Geosciences at TU Graz, you as a young scientist will be undertaking research on a high international level. You will work on solutions for current problems in geoscience. Depending on the subject of your dissertation, you will complete either a doctoral programme in engineering sciences or a doctoral programme in natural sciences.

As you are part of the scientific community at the doctoral school, you have the opportunity to talk to teachers, researchers and other students about your progress and results at interdisciplinary seminars and workshops. In addition, your supervisor will support you in writing your dissertation by providing both their expertise and contacts in the focus area.

Dissertation

• You undertake independent research in a specific application area of geoscience.
• You look for solutions to natural science related problems and technical problems in geoscience.
• You publish, present and defend your research results.

Courses (curricular workload)

• You gain fundamental knowledge and specialise in the subject of your dissertation.
• You gain experience of geoscientific methods.
• You regularly talk to teachers and other students about your progress and the results of your dissertation.

Depending on the subject of your dissertation, you are assigned to either the Class of Earth Sciences or the Class of Geodesy.

Research core areas

• Tectonics and structural geology
• Geodynamics and geochemistry
• Mineralogy and petrology
• Geobiology and palaeoecology
• Actuopalaeoecology, palaeobiogeography and stratigraphy
• Groundwater reservoirs and fault zones as drinking water supplies
• Experiments to verify mechanisms of the formation of carbonate minerals
• Carbonate formation in natural and industrial environments
• Silicate, phosphate and oxide mineral formation and weathering
• Environmental and applied mineralogy
• Mass movement and avoidance strategies
• Quantification of scouring processes in tectonically damaged rock masses
• Statistic methods for documenting and predicting mountain behaviour during tunnel construction

Research activities

As an inter-faculty and inter-university platform, the Class of Earth Sciences offers an excellent environment for doing research in the fields of

• natural processes of movement in the interior and on the surface of the earth,
• the material and chemical structure and the distribution and cycling of chemical elements and their isotopes in minerals, rocks, soils, water, the atmosphere and the biosphere,
• the properties of natural minerals and rocks and their interactions with aqueous solutions, their conditions of formation and reaction mechanisms,
• the applicability of multi-proxy approaches to (palaeo-) environmental research,
• biological evolution of changing biodiversity patterns and interactions between organisms and their environment over the course of earth history,
• physical, chemical and microbiological processes in soils and groundwater, and their movements, and
  
• geological hazards such as landslides, mass movements, earthquakes and parameters used in geotechnical analyses, models and designs.

Research core areas

• Geospatial technologies (remote sensoring, geoinformation, photogrammetry)
• Sensor integration
• Monitoring systems
• Navigation
• Satellite geodesy
• Engineering geodesy
• Space sciences
• Physical geodesy and geophysics
• Mathematical and numerical geodesy