I am grateful to the Royal Meteorological Society for awarding me a grant from the Legacies Fund to attend the European Geosciences Union 2015 Annual Assembly in Vienna. I convened a session on emissions from volcanoes that filled one afternoon of the conference and this was well attended and well received. The session was a great opportunity to bring a lot of people working on problems of volcanic ash and gas emissions, from a lot of different perspectives and backgrounds, into the same room to share their work. The presentations were interesting and a lot of new ideas and observations were presented. There were many sessions on related topics throughout the week of the conference, presented under the three division headings of atmospheric sciences, natural hazards and geology, mineralogy, petrology and volcanology. By attending these sessions, I learnt a lot about different aspects and approaches to the same problems that I address from an atmospheric perspective, and I learnt a lot of information that is both directly useful to my work, and which provides useful context for it. In addition to the oral sessions, each day ended with several parallel poster sessions where beer and wine were provided. These were a great way to speak to people about specific aspects of their work and a really effective way of finding out what is going on in the field of research that I am interested in. Through the course of the week, I met people with whom I have worked in the past, and people with whom I would like to work in the future. This networking is a very positive aspect of the conference for me now as I come towards the end of my post-doctoral position and look for future projects to work on.
