A warm welcome to Prof. Hans-Rudolf Pfeifer's blog

Retiring is far from being an end. It is also a new begining. As the daugther, I would like to accompany my father, Prof. Hans-Rudolf Pfeifer into his new life by setting up this blog.

Prof. Hans-Rudolf Pfeifer, exploring the rock churches in Lalibela, Ethiopia

From my childhood perspective, my father has always been a person who would run into the mountains and collect a whole bunch of stones. I never really understood why one could be so exited about something as dead and cold as a stone. Maybe that's the reason why I moved to social sciences and studied economics.
For a long time in my life I successfully managed to ignore my father's professional world. I was the economist, he was the geologist. But one day this has changed. I had the strong feeling that economics was not giving me the answers which i was looking for, so I decided to join in an interdiscipinary seminar on environmental issues. Before I knew it, i was sitting in an auditorium listening to my own father.

I suddendly discovered a man, who beyond the inexplicable enthousiam for stones, is a very broadly interested person. Whatever the emerging topic is, he always manages to collect an incredible number of publications and become an expert on the topic within no time. He always has pretty avant-gardistic ideas and opinions about environmental issues, inspiring many others to do reseach in his direction.

always ready with a facinating explanation

I guess this was an important turn over in our father-daughter relationship. We suddendly discovered that we have very different views on the world, but bringing them together would cross-fertilize our thoughts and our work.

An initial step in this cross-fertilisation was the creation of the environmental systems bachelor class at the newly created faculty for geosciences and environment at the university of Lausanne, to which i could contribute with my pedagocial flair and learn more about environmental sciences. I ended up, writing a PhD on the edge of economics and geosciences and became a GIS specialist.

Thanks to some PhD students, Africa became one my father's new challenge. I remember reading through one of his research proposal. It was focusing on water analysis. As an economist, I found that very irrelevant and ended up rewriting the introduction focusing on the challenge of eradicating poverty in Africa and how reuse of used water could contribute to this goal (obviously by making some water analysis). This project proposal was accepted (probably more because the project was good rather than my introduction) and was the start of my father's big Senegal adventure.

Probably inspired by my father's work, I joint Nile Basin Challenge Program in Ethiopia for my post doc, where I learnt a lot not only about matching agricultural technolgies to the context of the rural communities,  but also about social medias and how to reach out to people,  sharing scientific knowledge with non-scientists. My blog focusing on developments in rural areas, has become a space of debate, a source of information and reportings from the realities on the ground that with more than 1000 clicks per months is regularly followed by a small but interested community. It has proven to me, that new media offers us new spaces to share, to integrate and to interact.

inspiring Ethiopian kids

Over his lifetime, my father has been inspiring many students and colleagues, but with this retirement, he will loose the university plateform and its enthousiatic students. However it does not mean that he has nothing to share anymore nor that he cannot inspire up-coming generations with his avant-gardistic thoughts. For this reason, I am launching today his personal blog, his new space to share and interact with you, making sure that his retirement is a new begining in which you former students, colleages and friends can continue interacting and maybe meet new people to interact with.

I am just left with wishing my father many inspiring interactions for the up-coming years and a good start into the virtual world of social media.