Zaid Abubakari has been awarded the 2020 Geoforum Student Paper Award and Bruno Virgilio Portela has been awarded the Geological Remote Sensing Group 2020 Student Award. Both winners will receive bursaries. Zaid will receive €1000 to support his attendance at a suitable professional conference and Bruno will receive £1,000 to support his studies and research work. Both students got the award for their excellent papers.
Zaid Abubakari
PhD student Zaid Abubakari won his award for his paper on the (non-)registration of inherited land in Ghana. In his paper, he concludes that land registration is influenced by multiple normative frames, namely official social and practical. Zaid says: We found that beyond organizational inefficiencies, the eventual decision of a successor of property to report transfers for registration depends on the nature of property claims, the manner of property sharing and holding, and the existence of ‘halfway-documents’ that provide some sort of legitimacy.”
Bruno Virgilio Portela
MSc student Bruno Virgilio Portela won his award with his research on the use of proximal and remote sensing data to map overprinting patterns in the Yerington mineral district. And he explored its implications to mineral exploration on an epithermal gold system. “The methodology I am working on, along with my supervisors Dr Frank van Ruitenbeek and Dr Chris Hecker, will lead to a more objective, effective and cost-efficient mineral exploration strategy in multi-phased epithermal systems”, says Bruno.
