Driving Research by Creatively Asking Questions

Questions are the prime driver of research because they are invitations to answers. Knowing the main questions to be addressed for a research project is usually not enough because the main question often is too broad to lead to specific actions. In this seminar we discuss the importance of questions in research, different ways to generate research questions, and ways to order questions so that they naturally lead to a workplan for research.

This Workshop is led by Roel Snieder who holds the W.M. Keck Distinguished Chair of Professional Development Education at the Colorado School of Mines. He received in 1984 a Masters degree in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics from Princeton University, and in 1987 a Ph.D. in seismology from Utrecht University. In 1993 he was appointed as professor of seismology at Utrecht University, where from 1997-2000 he served as Dean of the Faculty of Earth Sciences. Roel served on the editorial boards of Geophysical Journal International, Inverse Problems, Reviews of Geophysics, the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, and the European Journal of Physics. In 2000 he was elected as Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. He isauthor of the textbooks  "A Guided Tour of Mathematical Methods for the Physical Sciences", "The Art of Being a Scientist", and "The Joy of Science" that are published by Cambridge University Press. In 2011 he was elected as Honorary Member of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists, and in 2014 he received a research award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2016 Roel received the Beno Gutenberg Medal from the European Geophysical Union and the Outstanding Educator Award from the Society of Exploration Geophysicists. He received in 2020 the Ange Melagro Prize for his outstanding class Science and Spirituality. From 2000-2014 he was a firefighter in Genesee Fire Rescue where he served for two years as Fire Chief. 

This workshop is being shared with other institutions across Colorado as part of GradCO.

At Mines, this workshop is part of the Career Toolkit for Graduate Students workshop series. Career Toolkit for Graduate Students is a workshop series aiming to provide early career researchers with tips, tools, and best practices across the research lifecycle as well as prepare students for life beyond school.

The series is hosted weekly by Seth Vuletich, Scholarly Communications Librarian, and Roel Snieder, Director of the Center for Professional Development Education.