NWLDW 2024

Olav B. Lian completed his BSc in physics at Simon Fraser University (SFU), Canada, in the 1980’s, in the same department where optical dating was invented by one of its professors, David J. Huntley. In 1986, the year after the seminal paper “Optical Dating of Sediments” was published in Nature by Huntley et al., Olav was hired as a research assistant in Huntley’s laboratory. It was an exciting time in the field as the first experiments to test the utility of the method where being performed, and new equipment and analytical software were being designed and built in-house. After completing his MSc in physical geography (SFU), Olav began a PhD in Quaternary geology in the early 1990’s at Western University, Canada, but did much of his doctoral research back in Huntley’s lab at SFU. This was followed by a research position in the Research School of Earth Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand where he managed that country’s first luminescence dating laboratory. After that Olav returned to SFU Physics as a Research Associate in Huntley’s laboratory, which was followed by a permanent faculty position in the Institute for Quaternary Research at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, where he directed its geochronology laboratory. In 2004 Olav was hired into a faculty position (physical geography) at University of the Fraser Valley (UFV), Abbotsford Canada, where he built a new luminescence dating laboratory, which absorbed much of Huntley’s SFU laboratory upon his retirement in 2007. Over the last nearly 40 years Olav, together with many of his colleagues and students, have been adapting optical dating protocols to various sedimentary environments in order to put long-term landscape change into a secure temporal context.

André Oliveira Sawakuchi is a Full Professor in Sedimentology at the Institute of Geosciences of the University of São Paulo and head of the Luminescence and Gamma Spectrometry Laboratory (LEGaL). His research deals with the interactions among Earth surface processes, climate and ecosystems in several time intervals across tropical South America, with focus on Amazonia. This is investigated through the application of luminescence methods to reconstruct sediment production and movement from source to sink through time.

Aditi is a postdoctoral researcher in the European Research Council project – PROGRESS at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Her primary research interests span the fields of geochronology, climate and geomorphology. She specialises in the application and development of trapped-charge techniques of luminescence and electron spin resonance (ESR) – not only as classical dating methods, but also as novel tools for provenance studies. Her present research uses these techniques to investigate how luminescence and ESR signals in quartz can inform our understanding of sediment transport from the source to the sink; thus, providing insight into landscape dynamics over a range of timescales.

Aditi holds a B.Sc and M.Sc in Chemistry from the University of Delhi, India in 2014. Following which, she pursued an M.Sc. in Archaeological Sciences at the University of Oxford, U.K. It was there that she developed an interest in luminescence dating and went on to obtain a PhD in Geology at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (and University of Mainz), Germany in 2021. Following her PhD, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Tübingen, Germany and subsequently moved to Romania in 2022, where she is currently based.

Luke Gliganic is a geoarchaeologist by training and a Research Fellow at the University of Wollongong in Australia. His research focus is on developing and using novel luminescence-based approaches to date complex, difficult-to-date sites. He has developed and applied luminescence rock surface dating (LRSD) approaches to directly date lithic quarrying activity and artefact discard at an open scatter site in Tibet. He has also developed methods to date stone arrangement construction and maintenance, approaches for developing chronologies and mixing rates in mixed deposits, and classical sediment burial dating. His current work is focussed on using LRSD approaches to directly date rock engravings and stone structures in Western Australia, buried artefacts at a Middle Stone Age site in South Africa, and potential LRSD applications using silcretes and cherts.