I began my academic career at Oxford studying physics, with a particular interest in the “human scale” worlds of thermodynamics, electromagnetics and fluid dynamics. This led me to collaborate with a meteorological sensors company during my final-year project on the physics of super-cooled rain.
I then moved to UCL for an MSc in climate change. I developed interests in climate modelling and paleoceanography. My MSc thesis concerned the reconstruction of a slow-down in North Atlantic deep-water production using physical and geochemical proxies from a marine sediment core. I then received funding for a four year PhD from the London NERC Doctoral Training Partnership, I joined the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM) at UCL, in the department of Earth Sciences.
During the first year of my PhD I investigated the role of snow in the estimation of sea ice thickness from space. My work revising the rate of sea ice thinning in the coastal Arctic seas garnered a surprising (to me) amoutn of media attention. In summer 2021 I published a short article on the previous winter’s transport of old sea ice into an area of the Arctic known to be inhospitable to ice in summer, which again gained some media traction.
I was initially unsure about seeking out the media, but in hindsight it really drove my career forward. I used my experience to get selected as part of the UCL delegation for the COP 26 UN Climate Conference in Glasgow, where I volunteered for the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative (ICCI). The ICCI then took me to the next two COPs in Sharm El Sheikh and Dubai, and my attendance there had a snowballing effect as I made more contacts, and improved my communication skills. I recently received a 3-year fellowship of the International Arctic Science Council (IASC), which has exposed me to the world of scientific agenda- and priority-setting, and has helped me get on a potentially quite consequential committee in the runup to the planned international Polar Year in 2032/3 (It's closer than you think!).
During my PhD I was also involved in a project investigating the radar-reflective properties of snow on sea ice using an in-situ instrument. Although it ended up not contributing to my thesis, I worked in a team analysing results from the Arctic Ocean MOSAiC expedition, and in April 2022 I took the radar to the Weddell Sea in Antarctica to investigate microwavewave penetration into ice that had survived the summer melt season. It was that work which formed the basis for my first post-doc at the University of Manitoba in Canada: Vishnu Nandan and I took the radar back to Antarctica in 2023 for eight months, studying the snowpacks of the nearby land-fast sea ice and glacier through the polar winter.
After eight years I've now returned to a physics department, and work for the Earth Observation Group at UIT, the Arctic University of Norway. This year I've been given some money by the World Climate Research Programme for some fieldwork to investigate the suitability of a new generation of handheld, low-cost radars for teaching and research on the cryosphere. I'm also working through the mountain of data we collected in Antarctica last year. Moving forward, I'm hoping to bring in more of a modelling focus to my work, and produce an operationalised and near-real-time data product for the state of snow on sea ice in both hemispheres.