Academic staff in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences 

Atmospheric processing controls the current and future composition of our atmosphere, and affects human and environmental health, air quality and climate. My research group addresses three areas of atmospheric chemistry central to these impacts :

• Measurement and interpretation of ozone production in the atmospheric boundary layer
• Sources and sinks for atmospheric oxidants: Impacts upon urban ...

Dr Mohamed Abdallah has a wide experience in applying various mass spectrometric techniques for analysis of trace levels of environmental contaminants in biotic and abiotic matrices including different human tissues. He has also made contributions to the field of human exposure to persistent organic pollutants using various exposure and pharmacokinetic models.

Dr David Adams has research interests in urban planning and urban geography.  He has a Geography BSc (2002) from Loughborough University, an MA in Spatial Planning (2008) and a PhD (2014) in planning from Birmingham City University.  He taught planning at Birmingham City University from 2008 until 2017.  In 2015, he became the programme lead for Birmingham City University’s ...

Dr Alam’s research focuses on understanding the chemistry of key atmospheric pollutants. His research involves interpreting laboratory and field measurements using numerical modelling, and improving the accuracy of chemistry within atmospheric models.

Paul is an Earth Scientist with wide interests, including igneous emplacement, structural geology, resource geology, engineering geology, metamorphic petrology and pedagogy in life and environmental sciences.  Much of his research has involved using various techniques (magnetic, geochemical, structural, geophysical) to understand the zonation and emplacement of granite bodies in the ...

Haydon is an industrial micropalaeontologist with over 35 years experience in the hydrocarbon exploration and production industry. He started as a specialist in Cretaceous foraminifera with ongoing interests in the biostratigraphy of Late Cretaceous sequences throughout North West Europe and North Africa. Subsequently projects have ranged through Carboniferous to Holocene microfaunas. He is a ...

Austin is an experienced teacher, researcher and writer who brings a passion for cities and urban life to all aspects of his professional work. He has played a leading role in development of planning education at the University of Birmingham and has established a research profile in the planning and regeneration of city centres and inner cities in Britain, Europe and North America.

Nick is a glaciologist, specialising in mass balance and dynamics of Earth's glaciers and ice sheets. His research aims to understand how and why Earth's land ice cover is changing and the impact of these changes on global sea levels and downstream systems. This research involves application and analysis of airborne and satellite remote sensing tools, in ...

Rebecca is a biogeochemist, specialising in nutrient cycling and environmental change in modern and past environments. Her research focuses on the biogeochemistry of peats, soils and sediments during environmental disturbance; the subsurface microbial response to natural and anthropogenic changes in atmospheric sulphur deposition, temperature, storms and floods, mineral reactivity and chemical ...

Lesley Batty is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Science (teaching focussed) and brings her passion and expertise in the field to all aspects of her work. She has a particular interest in providing inclusive environments for learning and in working closely with employers to provide skills-led education. She is the College Director for Mental Health and Wellbeing.

She has a particular ...

Mike is Director of Learning and Teaching and Director of Undergraduate Studies at CURS. He is heavily involved in both undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and in research student supervision.

David is staff member of the National Center of Atmospheric Sciences (NCAS) working at Birmingham University. His interests are in the research and development of scientific instrumentation, novel multivariate data analysis algorithms and atmospheric modelling tools used for the interpretation of data collected from atmospheric aerosols.

Dr Simon Bell’s research revolves around the Wintersense project, an ‘Internet of Things’ approach to sensing road surface temperatures. He aims to have a dense network of low-cost, Wi-Fi enabled, contactless sensors deployed across Birmingham by the end of 2015.

Simon has a strong background in the use of low-cost sensing for measuring weather conditions. He is also an ...

James is a paleoclimatologist, specialising in organic geochemistry. His research is focused on biomarker proxy development and reconstructing Cenozoic and Holocene climates.

 

Dr Susanne Börner is a senior researcher in the field of resource (in)security, youth agency, vulnerability and environmental justice. From 2019 to 2022, she is on a Marie Curie Global Fellowship to investigate young people’s local knowledge and social practices related to the food-water-energy nexus in relation to nexus threats (e.g., flooding and landslides) in disaster-prone ...

Dr Berta Bonet is an ecotoxicologist interested in how stress (anthropogenic and/or environmental) affect aquatic ecosystems performance among other scientific interests. Her current research focuses on the effects of the climate change (increase of temperature) on fluvial biofilms at different levels (molecular, functional and structural) and how this environmental change can modulate ...

Ian is a micropalaeontologist who studies calcareous benthic microfossils, particularly ostracods (microscopic Crustacea), but also foraminifera, to reconstruct past environments. His work spans much of the last 200 million years of earth history, with projects as diverse as the late-glacial history of lakes in Scotland and the vast inland seas of the Ponto-Caspian region, to sea-level change ...

Chris has been a lecturer in Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Birmingham from 1994 and became Senior Lecturer from 2007.

Dr Sophie Briffa is a materials’ scientist whose research interests include nanomaterial synthesis and characterisation, nanomaterial behaviour and transformations in the environment, nanosafety and nanomaterials for the purpose of conservation. 

Richard is a vertebrate palaeontologist with expertise in the systematics, evolution and biogeography of late Palaeozoic to Mesozoic reptiles. His current research programme aims to establish major patterns and drivers of terrestrial biodiversity change, as exemplified by four-limbed vertebrates (tetrapods), over the last 375 million years. He is also interested in the origin and ...

Dr Xiaoming Cai has over 20 years experience of research in large-eddy simulation (LES) of turbulence in the atmospheric boundary layer and in urban street canyons, dispersion of air pollutants in urban environment, and numerical modelling of meso-scale systems.

Dr Cante is an interdisciplinary researcher working across urban, media and African studies. Through ethnographic attention to everyday practices and perspectives, he examines how media infrastructures shape the city as a space of social exchange and political contest.

Professor Lee Chapman’s research interests are at the interface of climatology and engineering investigating the impact of weather and climate on the built environment; an important research area given the ever-increasing concentration (and vulnerability) of the population and critical infrastructure in urban areas. This covers a range of topics and sub-disciplines including ...

Dr Alexandros Chatzipavlidis is a physicist with expertise in physics and technology of materials, materials science, nanotechnology and nanomedicine.

Julian Clark is Reader in Political Geography at the University of Birmingham and Research Theme Lead for Human Geography. His research focusses upon critical geographical understandings of the state, and the governance of natural resources. Within these domains, Julian examines questions of state spatialities (how states as political objects are materialized and stabilised over space and ...

Dr Terri Cleary is a quantitative palaeobiologist studying vertebrate diversity patterns in deep time. In particular she is interested in the interactions of fossil record biases and environmental influences with terrestrial ectotherm diversity.

Dr Roger Close is a quantitative palaeobiologist. His research interests focus on macroevolutionary patterns, particularly those related to phenotypic evolution and taxonomic diversity.

Dr Natasha Cornea’s research sits at the intersections of urban and development geographies, focusing on urban environmental governance and politics in Indian and Zambian cities. Conceptually her research draws on post-structuralist and situated approaches to urban political ecology, the everyday state and everyday governance.

Derren holds a NERC Innovation Placement grant to work with Citizen’s UK in order to embed the use of environmental data, knowledge and understanding into community organising practice. From the 1^st August 2019 he will continue in a similar role for the NERC funded Engaging Environments Project.

Many of the crucial environmental issues facing the UK (and the rest of the world) have a ...

Leigh Crilley is a chemist specializing in the field of air pollution/atmospheric chemistry. His current research involves investigating the rate of ozone production in the boundary layer using in situ field measurements

Giulio is an environmental scientist specialised in soil and environmental field monitoring. His main current research focuses on the use of active distributed temperature sensing (A-DTS) techniques for detecting the occurrence of water turbidity spikes in groundwater wells and for soil moisture monitoring.

Rosie Day is an environmental human geographer interested in various aspects of peoples experience of, and engagement with, the wider environment. Much of her work has been in the area of environmental inequalities and environmental justice where she has developed a particular theme on ageing and environmental issues. She is currently largely focused on research to do with energy ...

Christopher Dean is a quantitative palaeobiologist studying diversity patterns in deep time. He is particularly interested in the spatial expression of fossil record biases and the impact these have on our understanding of ecology in deep time.

Dr Delgado-Saborit is an expert in exposure assessment studies using different sampling and analytical techniques to characterize inhalation doses, personal exposures and environmental levels of air pollutants. She has expertise in chemical speciation for source identification. She has coordinated large projects involving recruiting and sampling with subjects, sampling in a wide range of indoor ...

Dr Surindar Dhesi is an environmental health lecturer, researcher and active practitioner and leads the MSc Science of Occupational Health, Safety and Environment course. She has several years’ experience of working in Local Authority enforcement roles, including a period on secondment to the Health and Safety Executive. She has also worked as a consultant in the private sector. Her ...

Simon is an interdisciplinary lecturer in geography with broad research interests around human interactions with water and landscapes.  Much of his work focuses on “Anthropocene geomorphology” - unique landforms resulting from interactions between human activities and natural processes. Examples include how waste plastic is being incorporated into sediments and fluvial transport ...

Tom is a micropalaeontologist and paleoceanograher specializing in the study of fossil coccolithophore algae. His research interests are focused on the warm-climate states of the Paleogene period and include the use of coccolithophore assemblages and geochemical signatures as palaeoceanographic proxies. Tom is also interested in improving reconstructions of warm climate temperature ...

Warren Eastwood is a biogeographer and palaeoecologist who researches past environmental change for the last 25,000 years or so in the eastern Mediterranean region. His main specialism is elucidating natural versus human-induced vegetation change using pollen analysis (palynology). His research interests also include the impact of major volcanic eruptions and tephrochronology of volcanic ash ...

Kirsty is a micropalaeontologist and palaeoceanographer, specialising in planktic foraminifer and foraminifer-based geochemical records. She is interested in understanding the timing and nature of the interaction between global climate, geochemical cycling, and biota during the Cenozoic. A major research focus is elucidating the dynamics and consequences of transient climate events in the ...

Steven is an interdisciplinary environmental researcher with a broad interest in human-environment relations. His work is informed by rural geography, social anthropology and rural sociology and focuses on the relationship between sociocultural values and environmental practices, interventions, policies and governance. He has applied this approach most especially to the study of agriculture, ...

Emma’s research interests include the impact of weather on infrastructure, green infrastructure, air quality, and GIS. She has a background in geography, earth and environmental sciences, and research experience in academia and consultancy. 

Dr Fregonese’s research focuses on the relationship between geopolitics, conflict and everyday urban life. She is specialised in the geography of urban conflict in Lebanon. Her wider research includes social polarisation, urban warfare, post-terror situations, and historical geographies of sectarianism. She has published, together with Ralf Brand, The radicals' city. Urban environment, ...

Liam is an industrial nannopalaeontologist in the hydrocarbon exploration and production industry, his main expertise are in the Tertiary and Cretaceous of exploration regions worldwide, with particular emphasis on the wellsite monitoring of horizontal wells utilising nannoplankton. Liam teaches a 20 credit module in Calcareous Nannofossils on the MSc in Applied & Petroleum Micropalaeontology ...

Ignazio is currently working on sources of predictability in the Mediterranean using weather regimes at the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate in Bologna, Italy (CNR-ISAC). His research interests lie in the field of hydroclimatology, and particularly in understanding how climate variability and change alter the occurrence of extreme events like floods and droughts.

Dr Zhaoya Gong is a quantitative human geographer and Geographic Information Scientist. His research interests center on two interwoven themes, namely leveraging computational and data sciences to advance geographic information science, and dynamic processes of urbanisation and complex modalities of spatial structures generated at various scales, as articulated by interactions of land use and ...

Sarah is a palaeoclimatologist, geobiologist, and Earth system modeller studying the biogeochemical cycling of carbon between the atmosphere, the ocean, and marine sediments. Particular research interests include rapid carbon cycle perturbations (Mesozoic mass extinctions, Palaeogene hyperthermals), protracted multi-mullion year carbon cycle trends (co-evolution of life and the carbon cycle), and ...

Dr Griffiths is a social scientist, working on mobility and immigration enforcement in the UK. She has been a Birmingham Fellow at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences since February 2018, after completing an ESRC Future Research Leaders grant at the University of Bristol.

Dr Emily Guggenheim is an interdisciplinary scientist whose current research interests include characterization of a variety of environmentally and biomedically relevant nanomaterials, particularly understanding of their uptake, fate and toxicity following human exposure, employing (and developing) a variety of microscopical methodologies combined with automated image processing and analysis.

Sophie Hadfield-Hill is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Birmingham.  Principally a Children’s Geographer, Sophie’s expertise is children and young people’s everyday experiences of urban change in diverse contexts.  Her research portfolio spans young people’s lives in the UK, India and Brazil; she has been Principal and Co-Investigator on ...

Thomas Halliday is a quantitative macroevolutionary palaeobiologist studying the evolution of Late Cretaceous and Palaeogene vertebrates. In particular, he is interested in the diversification of placental mammals, global patterns of faunal similarity, and the methods used to answer big questions of relationships, timing, and diversity.

David is a physical geographer with interdisciplinary research interests focusing on three complementary themes within hydroclimatology (interface between hydrology-climatology): (1) hydroclimatological processes within alpine, Arctic, mountain and glacierized river basins; (2) climate and river flow regimes; and (3) river energy budget and water temperaturedynamics. He has cross-cutting ...

Stuart is an environmental chemist whose research addresses all aspects of the environmental sources, fate and behaviour of persistent organic pollutants (POPs). He has particular interests in human exposure to POPs with a focus on indoor pathways. He is also active in research that explores the environmental forensics utility of chirality.

Roy Harrison’s research interests lie in the field of environment and human health. His main specialism is in air pollution, from emissions through atmospheric chemical and physical transformations to exposure and effects on human health. Much of this work is designed to inform the development of policy.

Alan is a geologist and igneous petrologist working on large igneous provinces, subduction zone magmatism and generation of the Earth's first continental crust. His current research focuses on experimental petrology to determine if fusing oceanic plateau material can be linked to early crustal generation.

Benedikt Heudorfer is a hydrologic postdoc researcher with a focus on groundwater drought and groundwater dynamics.

Dr Hilton is a research focused palaeobotanist and evolutionary plant biologist with interests in palaeoenvironments and palaeoecology. His underlying goals are to increase the quantity of paleobotanical data included into evolutionary analyses and to provide a more detailed understanding of the past environments and climates in which fossil plants lived.  He has a broad background in ...

Simon Hodgkinson’s research traverses the boundary between meteorology and engineering, with a specific focus on the resilience of infrastructure systems to weather and climate hazards. This research adopts a multidisciplinary approach, advancing our understanding of the complex interactions between infrastructure service performance, system user behaviour, and both day-to-day and ...

Peter is interested in understanding and predicting climate change in both the past and future. Peter specialises in using Earth System models, particularly as applied to the periods prior to industrialisation.

Peter's personal website

Dr Jenkins is a Historical Geographer, with an interest in landscape change and people’s relationship with the past.

Dr Phil Jones is a cultural geographer who focuses on issues related to the city.  His work deals with a number of research areas including urban regeneration, cycling and the arts.  He has a particular interest in research methods, including qualitative GIS, mobile interviewing and arts-based approaches.

Steve Jones is a numerate geologist who studies the influence of the deep earth on climate. His published work spans mantle and crustal processes, oceanography and atmospheric science.

Dr Kärg Kama develops critical social science perspectives on natural resources development, specialising in unconventional fossil fuels, at the intersection of political geography, science and technology studies, and economic sociology. Dr Kama currently holds an ESRC Future Research Leaders award to study the scientific and political controversies of shale gas development in Europe. She is ...

Dr Nick Kettridge specializes in characterizing the ecohydrological resilience of ecosystems to both natural and anthropogenic disturbance. Much of his research focuses on peatlands; understanding the processes that control the provision of key ecosystem services within these environments, and quantifying their response to changing climatic conditions and extreme events such as fire and drought.

Kieran is an environmental scientist with a particular interest in freshwater systems. His research is split into two key areas:

1. assessing the impacts of environmental change (i.e. glacier retreat and droughts) on the structure and function of aquatic ecosystems, and;
2. unravelling dissolved organic matter and nutrient dynamics in anthropogenically modified river systems (i.e. urban and ...

Dr Owen King is a human geographer with particular interests in environmental governance and political ecology with an emphasis on extractive industries and water resources. He is a post-doctoral research fellow with the ESRC Future Research Leaders project ‘Geo-logics and geo-politics: the collective governance of European shale gas development.’

Professor Peter Kraftl is best known for his research on children’s geographies, and especially for research into the emotions, affects, materialities and practices that make up their everyday lives. He also publishes on geographies of education and architecture. He is currently an Editor of the journals Area and Children’s Geographies and was a founding member of the Geographies of ...

Professor Dr Stefan Krause is Professor of Ecohydrology and Biogeochemistry in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences. His interdisciplinary research group on coupled groundwater and surface water systems investigates the multifaceted impacts of global environmental change on hydrological fluxes, biogeochemical cycling and contaminant transport, and ecohydrological ...

Dr Irina Kuznetsova's research expertise includes areas of migration, forced displacement, health, and critical urbanism. Her recent projects focus on social consequences of population displacement in Ukraine, Russia, Rwanda, Nigeria and Japan, including mental health and well-being, and the impact of migration on rural communities.

Dr Joshua Larsen is a Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography. His research interests include:  Hydrology, ecohydrology, biogeochemistry, water quality, and palaeohydrology.

Stephan is a vertebrate palaeontologist, specialising in functional morphology and biomechanical analysis. His research focuses on the relationship between form and function in extinct vertebrates and how biomechanical function evolved through time in various vertebrate groups, such as dinosaurs, birds, crocodiles and mammals. Stephan applies a variety of computational techniques to restore the ...

Professor Gregor Leckebusch is a leading expert in natural science research on meteorological and climatological extreme events and related impact assessments. He played a key role in multiple national and international interdisciplinary projects dedicated to natural variability of and anthropogenic changes in extremes and impacts. Focus of his actual research is a better understanding of ...

Mark is an ecologist researching environmental change in freshwaters. His research group is focused on understanding how environmental stressors and climate change, especially extreme climatic events such as floods, droughts and heat waves, affect the structure and functioning of aquatic ecosystems. His group works empirically across a range of spatial and temporal scales, from laboratory ...

Peter’s research and teaching focuses on the relationship between people and place based social exclusion, how policies are designed to reduce exclusion and increase competitiveness whilst reconciling the uneven trajectory and function of places.

He has led on a number of housing market, regeneration and planning related research and consultancy projects for a diverse range of clients and ...

James Levine’s interests straddle the natural and built environments, and increasingly focus on the area of overlap between the two.  James is particularly interested in the benefits of green infrastructure – to both people and planet – in the context of ecosystem services and Natural Capital.  He is currently Co-Investigator / Researcher of a NERC Innovation ...

Dr Liang is a Tertiary palynologist with interests in Cenozoic and Quaternary terrestrial ecosystems, reconstructing past ecosystems using multi-proxy approaches, quantitative and qualitative assessments of climate and environmental change, and Cenozoic Palynology. Her research utilises high resolution sampling of pollen and spores to qualitatively and quantitatively reconstruct ...

Professor Iseult Lynch, Chair of Environmental Nanosciences, joined the academic staff at the University of Birmingham in March 2013.

She is an Associate Editor for Environmental Science: Nano, and Deputy director for the Facility for Environmental Nanomaterials Analysis and Characterisation (FENAC)at the University of Birmingham.  Her research focuses on the environmental ...

Zena Lynch worked as a Principal Environmental Health Officer for many years, prior to becoming the Health Policy Advisor for the West Midlands Regional Assembly and latterly as Programme Director for ‘Living Well West Midlands’. She currently teaches on the MSc in Environmental Health and MSc in Public and Environmental Health Science and the BSc Environmental Science courses.

Rob MacKenzie is an atmospheric scientist with a particular interest in how plants affect air composition. Watch a video of him describing one aspect of his research in 60 seconds by clicking on the play icon above. 

As a result of a £15M grant, the University of Birmingham has set up the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR), of which Rob is delighted to be ...

Dr Marco Maffione is a field geologist interested in global tectonics and large-scale tectonics processes operating at plate boundaries, including subduction initiation, mid-ocean ridge spreading, and deformation of orogenic systems. He specialises in palaeomagnetism, structural geology, and magnetic fabrics, and has recently applied these techniques in various ophiolites of Turkey, Cyprus, ...

Feng is a water scientist with key research interests in the intersection of water, ecosystems, society and technologies, focusing on three main themes: (i) hydro-ecosystems and ecosystem services under change, (ii) pathways to socio-hydrological resilience, and (iii) low-cost water sensor networks and citizen science.

Tom Matthews is a Birmingham Fellow who researches global environmental change issues using macroecological, macroevolutionary and biogeographical approaches. He applies a mixture of theoretical and empirical methods to investigate various macroecological topics, including species-area relationships and species abundance distributions. He has a keen interest in island systems, and in particular ...

Dr Lorena Melgaço is a Brazilian architect and urban planner with an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Planning and an MSc in International Cooperation and Urban development. She is currently a research fellow at the SAPER Project: The appropriateness, usefulness and impact of the current urban planning curriculum in South African Higher Education, where she aims to understand planning ...

Professor Alexander Milner has been at the University of Birmingham for 15 years, where he was initially responsible for setting up the Environmental Science and Environmental Management degrees. He is now responsible for the Masters degree in River Environmental Management. His research involves river ecosystems in alpine and Arctic environments and has long term studies in Glacier Bay ...

Dominique Moran’s research and teaching is in the sub-discipline of carceral geography, a geographical perspective on incarceration. Supported by the ESRC, her research has informed and extended theoretical developments in geography, criminology and prison sociology, whilst interfacing with contemporary debates over hyperincarceration, recidivism and the advance of the punitive state. ...

Pat Noxolo’s research brings together the study of international development, culture and in/security, and uses postcolonial, discursive and literary approaches to explore the spatialities of a range of Caribbean and British cultural practices. Recent work has focused on: re-theorising Caribbean in/securities; theorizations of space in Caribbean literature; Caribbean laughter and ...

Jon Oldfield’s research explores Russian understandings of physical natural systems with a specific focus on the work and ideas of Russian physical geographers during the late tsarist and Soviet periods. He is currently examining the development of Soviet climate science via the work of the climatologist M.I. Budyko. His research is funded by the ESRC, AHRC and British Academy.

My primary interest focuses on understanding how different environmental variables, such as water temperature and flow, affect the habitat and physiology of key fish species. My research aims to generate knowledge about aquatic ecosystems at risk of thermal degradation and to inform on stream restoration strategies and aquatic resources management, especially in the context of human impacted ...

Dr Pfrang’s research is in the area of gas-phase and heterogeneous atmospheric chemistry currently focusing on the fate of atmospheric aerosols and their impacts on air quality and climate change.  He is also studying reactions of initiators of atmospheric oxidation (in particular ozone and nitrate radicals) with volatile organic compounds (VOCs), e.g. stress-induced plant ...

Dr Phalkey is an interdisciplinary researcher in climate vulnerability and resilience to natural hazards in the global south. She brings ten years of research experience from district, national and international level through her academic and research work in a university, think tank organisations and the NGO sector. She is also a published photographer and filmmaker. Currently, she is the lead ...

Ian Phillips is best known for writing the most comprehensive account of the 1973 Isle of Man Summerland fire disaster, which can be obtained by going to summerlandfiredisaster.co.uk. He gained his BSc Geography degree from the University of Birmingham in 1995, before continuing at the University to complete an MSc in Meteorology and Climatology and a PhD in Geography. Ian has been ...

Francis is an environmental scientist with wide ranging interests in the atmospheric sciences, human health and sustainable cities. He trained as a physical chemist and he uses this fundamental knowledge to develop novel instrumentation and probe systems of interest. 

Francis has active research projects in the broad areas of air pollution, climate change, fundamental aerosol chemistry and ...

Tom Pugh is a scientist with a keen interest in interactions and feedbacks between the terrestrial biosphere and the global climate system, processes he investigates using powerful computer models. Read more about Tom's research at bioatmo.wordpress.com.

Jessica Pykett is a social and political geographer with research interests in citizenship, governance, and political subjectivities.  Her research to date has focused on affective and emotional techniques of governance, and the influence of neuroscience and behavioural science on public policy and economic theory. Current work is on the intersections of neuroscience and geography, concepts ...

Adam Ramadan’s work lies at the intersection between political and cultural geography. It addresses the ‘everyday’ of geopolitics, how ordinary people understand and negotiate their position within broader geopolitical dynamics. Much of this work has focused on the Middle East, and in particular on refugee issues.

Tim Reston is a geologist and a geophysicist with interests in the use of geophysics to study geological problems, especially tectonics. He specialises in the seismic imaging and tectonics of rifted continental margins and of slow-spreading mid-ocean ridges, with particular emphasis on detachment tectonics and the effects of mantle serpentinization.

Dr Paul Richardson is Lecturer in Human Geography. He is a political and historical geographer with regional interests in Russia and Eurasia.

Michael Riley’s research principal research interests are in groundwater flow and contaminant transport processes, particularly in the context of fractured rock hydrogeology.

John Round is a socio-economic geographer whose main research interest is concerned with how people/households develop tactics to cope with marginality in all its forms. His PhD examined how senior citizens survive in the Russian far north east city of Magadan in the face of extreme economic marginalization and hostile climatic conditions.  After this he researched the experiences of middle ...

Jon Sadler is a biogeographer and ecologist whose research focuses on species population and assemblage dynamics in animals (sometimes plants). His work is highly interdisciplinary, bisecting biogeography, ecology, urban design, riparian management and island Biogeography. It uses approaches that combine detailed field studies, field and laboratory experimentation, sometimes with social science ...

Kat is a Lecturer in Urban and Regional Planning within CURS. Kat is a Chartered Town Planner and has extensive knowledge and practical experiences of national, local and neighbourhood planning processes in England and Wales.

Professor Sambrook Smith investigates the linkages between river processes and sedimentology at scales ranging from individual pores within a river bed up to km-long bars in large rivers.

The World’s largest rivers suffer from a paucity of knowledge about how they currently function, how they have evolved through time and how they may respond to future environmental changes. This lack of ...

Ivan is a vertebrate palaeobiologist who specialises on the evolution and diversification of Palaeozoic non-tetrapod vertebrates, including conodonts, with a particular focus on the earliest skeletonising fish and the origin of the sharks. Current research primarily focuses on patterns of dispersal within early vertebrates and the influence of their palaeoecology on diversity and extinction.

Currently awarded a prestigious Dorothea Schlözer fellowship at the Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany and an honorary fellow at Birmingham researching seed plant evolution whilst trying to pull together molecular and fossil data into a coherent picture.

The atmosphere and atmospheric processes interact with the biogeochemistry of the earth system. This in turn affects human and environmental health, air quality and climate. My research group addresses three areas of atmospheric biochemistry central to these impacts:

• Sources and processes affecting air quality
• Emission, processing and deposition of atmospheric nutrients and their impact on ...

Ajit is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the group of Professor Francis Pope. Currently, he is working on ASAP East Africa project (www.asap-eastafrica.com), which aims to conduct a quantitative study of urbanisation trends and their impact on air quality, while generating a holistic evidence base on the causes, consequences and levels of air pollution. The project also identifies social, ...

My research is focused on halogens and radical chemistry in the troposphere, combining measurements and modelling. My main research project is about the processes that form and destroy ozone, and other pollutants, in the lower atmosphere.

Personal website: www.robsom.org

Dr Carl Stevenson is a structural geologist with a focus on the emplacement and subsurface distribution of igneous and volcanic rocks. His research uses rock magnetism, geophysics and petrology to determine the large-scale geometry and internal architecture of intrusions and has led to breakthroughs in understanding magma transport and accommodation in the Earth’s crust. This work has ...

Dr William A Stubbings is a post-doctoral researcher with a high level of experience in environmental and analytical chemistry, specifically related to the determination of concentrations of organic contaminants, such as flame retardants, plasticisers, and their metabolites.

Dr Fraser Sugden is a human geographer who has written extensively on shifting class, gender and generational relations in agriculture, and their interaction with contemporary environmental, political and economic stresses.

He has conducted intensive rural fieldwork across South and East Asia, with a focus on Nepal and the Eastern Gangetic Plains, and was based in this region for most of the ...

Simiao is a quantitative hydrogeologist who studies the mechanism of LNAPLs (Light Non-Aqueous Phase Liquids) migration and (re)distribution. 

John Tellam’s main research interests are in inorganic, surface-interacting, solute and particle transport in groundwaters, with a particular emphasis on sandstone aquifers.

Dr Sami Ullah’s research is mainly focused on the biogeochemistry of nitrogen and its linkages to carbon and phosphorus cycling under global change in soils under forest, peatland/wetland, grassland, and agricultural crops. The impetus of his research is to advance mechanistic understanding of the response of key microbial functions such as denitrification, nitrogen and carbon ...

Professor Valsami-Jones’ research interests focus on understanding reactivity at the nanoscale, particularly interactions of nanoparticles with pollutants and biota and biomineralisation processes. She has carried out research on the interaction of a variety of carbon- and metal-based nano-objects with biota in vitro and in vivo and has pioneered novel methods of labelling ...

Dr Anne Van Loon is a hydrologist interested in the relationship between water, people and the environment. Her research focuses on hydrological extremes (droughts and floods) and uses interdisciplinary methods to understand hydrological processes and their interaction with human activities. She currently works on groundwater, snow and ice, urban hydrology, and mangroves

Dr Watt’s research investigates the physical and chemical processes that control the behavior and long-term development of volcanoes. Most of this work focuses on volcanism in subduction zones. Current projects include tephrochronological reconstructions of past explosive eruptions, studies of large-scale volcanic landslides and their associated hazards, and the chemistry and evolution of ...

James Wheeley is a teaching-focused lecturer in sedimentary geology and sedimentary basin analysis. His research interests lie in carbonate sedimentology and applied micropalaeontology (especially conodont isotopes) which he is using to address deep time (Palaeozoic) palaeoclimatic and palaeoecological problems. 

Dr Martin Widmann is a climate scientist. His current main research area is regional climate change, in particular the development and validation of statistical downscaling methods. He also studies past climates; the main activity in this field is the development of data assimilation methods to combine climate simulations with empirical knowledge from proxy data.

Dr Jingsha Xu is a research fellow in air pollution in school of Geography, Earth & Environmental Sciences. Her general research interests mainly lie in the characteristics and sources of aerosol pollution and its impact on human health.

Cristiana is a cultural geographer currently working with Dr Sophie Hadfield-Hill on the New Urbanisms in India research project funded by the ESRC. The project investigates the everyday life of children, young people and families living in a new urban development in India.

Cristiana has conducted extensive qualitative research in India for her doctoral research, which explored tourist ...

Dr Peng Zhang is an environmental scientists and toxicologist who has multidisciplinary expertise including environmental chemistry, toxicology, and material science.

Dr. Zhiling Guo is an environmental scientist and toxicologist who has multidisciplinary expertise including environmental toxicology and molecular toxicology.

Dr Zhong's current research focuses on modelling the flow and thermal structures of the urban atmospheric boundary layer using a Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) model and a Large Eddy Simulation (LES) model. Favourable weather conditions for measurement campaigns (i.e. the deployment of the biotelemetry/bio-aerial-systems) will be identified via pre-deployment modelling, primarily using a ...