About me

I am a palaeoclimate scientist at the University of Leicester, UK. I research Earth's ancient climates and environments, using sediments and fossils, and their chemistry, to understand the physical nature of past worlds. My background since my PhD is primarily as a 'data' person, as opposed to a 'modelling' person, but I do mix-and-match between these two spheres and my current role that involves a lot more modelling work, including designing and running climate model experiments. My primary research focus is in understanding what happened to Earth's climate and physical environments when early animal-rich ecosystems were first evolving around the transition between the Neoproterozoic and Phanerozoic eons, about 600 to 500 million years ago.

More recently, I have been taking a longer, broader, view of biosphere and climate change across Earth history. I have been developing ideas about how humanity fits within the scope and scale of past changes, and what possible future paths we might tread. More on this to come very soon...

I am also fascinated by the fossil evidence of early animal life, and particularly the exceptionally preserved fossils that tell us what these early animals looked like. These remarkable fossils can even preserve soft tissues, including bits of soft anatomy that most people would never expect to survive hundreds of millions of years of geological processes.

As well as my personal research, I am a co-founder and Managing Editor of Open Palaeontology which is a new diamond open access journal for publishing palaeontological research. We founded Open Palaeontology to provide an innovative, accessible, and transparent space to publish all aspects of palaeontological research, and to tackle some of the concerns we have about the current academic publishing landscape. I encourage you to read our opening editorial and explore the OPal website for more information.