Thomas Wong Hearing

Hello!

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. By background, I am primarily a 'data' person, as opposed to a 'modelling' person, but I do like to mix-and-match between these two spheres and have recently transitioned to a new role that involves a lot more modelling work. I am particularly interested 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.

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.

More recently, I have been taking more computational approaches to geoscience. In particular, I have been expanding my working knowledge of R and Python, and moving more into the computer modelling realm. This website is part of my (slow and ongoing) attempts to broaden my computing and coding experience, in this case using HTML and CSS. Let me know what you think!

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.