Profile

I currently live in Scotland which is the birth place of UK geology! My work includes trying to understanding how sediments fill a basin, to how volcanic rocks are emplaced, to using legacy data from oil and gas exploration to help the energy transition. I’m pretty obsessed with rocks, fossils and dinosaurs in general but also love art, fantasy books and cats. I’m dyslexic, so can have trouble with reading and writing, but it doesn’t stop me from being a good scientist.

Pronouns She/Her

I have had a non-traditional career so far. I currently work as a academic researcher at a University but have also worked as a geoscientist in the petroleum industry. Both have been very interesting and I have worked with a diverse range of people. During my PhD I studied ancient volcanic rocks to work out what happened and compare them to other examples. Although I work on different things now, I still love studying volcanic rocks!

Visiting Stromboli, Italy, where I saw my first live volcanic eruption!

After my PhD I went to work for a Oil and Gas company. Petroleum Geoscience is not very popular right now but it is important to remember that even during the Energy Transition, we need oil and gas to keep the lights on and to make many of the renewable energy technologies.

Visiting an offshore oil rig when I worked at a petroleum Geoscientist

I have been able to use the skills gained during my PhD and employment to be a better researcher. I now use the same skills to work on understanding submarine landslides and tsunamis. Just because you start off in one career, doesn’t mean you have to stay there!

Sedimentary core logging at the British Geology Survey, Keyworth

In normal circumstances, I work in an office at the University but right now I work from home and connect to my computer in my office. Most days are spent trying to work out what happened to sediments that used to be on the coastline but is now deep under the ocean and how it got there. I do this so I can work out if it caused a tsunami and if the same thing was to happen today, would it also cause a tsunami. This is really important because lots of people live along the coastline and would need to be warned!

My home office, where I spend most of my days thanks to COVID-19!

Right now I work from home and connect to the computer in my office to use a range of special software to look at data that images the rocks beneath the Earth’s surface. This is done by using sound waves, similar to using an ultrasound to image a baby. This is turned into an image that gives an impression of the rocks and structures km’s down. This can be used to reconstruct how the rocks came to be formed and tells us the geological history of the area.

This is an example of the type of data I use to image rocks beneath the Earth’s surface. Open access data from the OGA NDR.

If I’m on field work, my work can be very different! It can depend on which country I’m in, the weather and what kind of field work I am doing. I will often spend my whole day outside looking at rocks/collecting rocks/taking pictures of rocks…  I’ve done field work in the UK, Spain, the Alps, Tenerife, Iceland and the USA. I was meant to be going to Indonesia for my current research, but it was sadly cancelled.

Field work looking at volcanic rocks in Skye, Scotland