Stories of the 2024 ICTP Diploma Graduates

Arwa Al Rashdi has been passionate about science since she was a child. “All of my teenage books used to be about physics. I used to read pop science books on quantum mechanics or general relativity, and then try to find out more, only to be frustrated for not being able to receive answers. I come from a small village where there are no public libraries, and I remember having to go through almost all of our family encyclopedia at home once, in order to find out how light comes out of bulbs. I was so happy when I finally found out about tungsten!” she says, her eyes shining with excitement.

After high-school, Al Rashdi received a scholarship to study at the University of Exeter, in the UK, where she did both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics. Back in Oman, she started working as a lecturer and settled into a new life in her home country, in the middle of the pandemic – but something caught her attention and made her want to change path. “I started noticing many extreme weather events, such as tropic cyclones as well as heavy and prolonged summer rains. The great damage that these events were causing was heartbreaking,” she explains, adding, “I started wondering whether they were the result of natural variability or caused by climate change, and my interest in studying climate science kept increasing from there.”

The ICTP Diploma Programme would allow me to acquire all the skills I needed to embark on a PhD in climate science in one year, and I jumped at the opportunity.

Seeing the destruction caused by climate change first-hand made Al Rashdi want to do a PhD in climate science, but her background in condensed matter physics and lack of advanced knowledge in climate science made it a long shot. “Then one of my friends told me about the ICTP Diploma Programme, which in one year would allow me to acquire all the skills I needed to embark on a PhD in climate science, and I jumped at the opportunity,” she recounts.

When she was accepted to the Programme last year, Al Rashdi had recently taken on a permanent job as a lecturer at A’sharqia University, was newly married and had just settled in a new house with her husband. She was ready to leave all this, to sell her car, and pack all of her belongings in a few suitcases to follow her dream to study climate change. She and her husband decided to seize the opportunity and embark on the adventure. “We had to make huge changes in our lives in order to move to a completely different country, whose language we barely knew, but we were ready for a drastic change,” she explains.

I enjoyed the whole process, because the topic and the lectures made it all fun.

At the end of the year at ICTP, Al Rashdi took the opportunity to finally start answering a question that had been following her ever since heavy summer rain had damaged her grandfather’s palm dates in Oman. “In my final project, I am studying the impact of climate change on the production of palm date crops in the Arab world and neighboring countries, specifically looking at the effect of prolonged out-of-season rain,” she explains. “My supervisor Adrian Tompkins guided me through the literature that would help me build a statistical model that takes into account several parameters such as temperature, accumulation of heat and precipitation, which are all publicly available data, and look at how they affect dates’ later growth stages, which is when date palms are the most vulnerable,” she continues. “It was so exciting to see that the model confirms something that I have seen in real life: that in 2022, prolonged rains have affected date palms in the whole of Oman,” she adds.

The ICTP Postgraduate Diploma Programme is an intense, one-year programme that covers a wide range of topics in a very short time. “It was a tough year. Sometimes we studied non-stop for several days and weeks in a row, but I enjoyed the whole process, because the topic and the lectures made it all fun,” says Al Rashdi, adding, “I am really grateful for this opportunity. One year ago, I would have never expected that I would learn so much!”

When asked about her plans for the future, Al Rashdi replies, “I want to study climate variability and predictability, digging more deeply into climate change, by doing a PhD in climate science. I also definitely want to go back to my country at some point and I hope that I will also finally be able to satisfy my curiosity about the climate in my region.” She also wants to get involved in outreach activities that raise awareness on climate change, “One of my passions is to help people understand what is going on with climate change and how what we do has an impact, because we are all affected by climate change and knowledge is empowering,” she concludes.