Profile

I live in Southampton with my partner and two cats. Indoors, I’m a big fan of books, box sets and videogames, but I also like to go hiking outdoors, enjoy exploring places that I visit (sometimes with my work), and take far too many photographs. I know far too much about Star Wars, Half-Life and Monty Python.

The technical name for what I am is a marine biogeochemical modeller. This involves making mathematical models of living things in the ocean – mostly plankton – and the things like light and nutrients that are important to them. We do this to understand what controls how abundant plankton are, in part so that we can try to work out what’s going to happen in the future. One of the reasons that plankton are important is because of the role that they play in the ocean’s carbon cycle. They use this up at the surface, and some of what they use makes it into the deep ocean – which is important for how big a store the ocean is for carbon. And the more carbon the ocean stores, the less the atmosphere stores – and the less climate change we get. To be fair, the ocean itself plays a big role in the carbon cycle too, but I’m much more interested in the plants and animals that make their living as plankton. The model I use at the moment is called MEDUSA (there’s a picture of what’s in this below) and it currently lives within a model of the whole Earth called UKESM1. Together with many close colleagues, we perform simulations of the Earth in which its atmosphere, ocean and land all interact with one another, moving water, heat, carbon and other things around in 3 dimensions. Our simulations work a little like videogames, but without aliens and less shooting things. We use these simulations to understand how the world works in places or on timescales that we can’t easily look. Usually that’s the present-day, sometimes it’s the future, and on occasion I’ve looked deep into the past.