Profile

I grew up not being that interested in the mountains, but, did spend many a summer on family camping holidays and I lived close to coast. When I headed off to University to do a Geology degree (I actually applied for a mix of Psychology & Geology degrees as I had no idea what I wanted to be) I spend more and more time outdoors on module trips. It was those trips that got me into the outdoors and ever since i’ve walked, climbed, cycled or ran in as many mountainous places as I can. I am sometimes found on a paddleboard but the sea is a scary place compared to the mountains! I spend a good chunk of time trying to get my kids (11 & 6) out in the hills too.

I started out as a geologist, with lots of time during my degree mapping rocks and their relationships to each other. I always thought I’d end up working in oil & gas, or mining, but the more time I spent in the mountains and on the coastlines, the less I wanted that. I now research the threats that landslides pose to people and things we care about (buildings, roads, rail, power lines, fibre optics etc). These events can be triggered by earthquakes, rainfall, climate change (e.g. permafrost changes) and galcier retreat.  I use realtime monitoring like seismometers, water level sensors, laser scanners, but also computer modelling and lots of remote sensing (satellite data). I love being outside, so I build in as much fieldwork as I can, i’ve looked at landslide issues in Antarctica, Greenland, the Himalaya (Bhutan, India, Pakistan) as well as the Alps and a LOT of time looking at Scottish landslide problems.

I spend lots of time figuring out how to approach the geography questions I ask – for example ‘how dangerous would that glacial lake be if it emptied due to a landslide?’ I have to work out how a flood might be triggered, where it would go and how fast, and, who is in the way at the time of day the flood occurs. I use a mix of remote sensing (e.g. Landsat and Sentinel 2) to look at how slopes are moving, then models to route water along valleys, and then I use map data, census data, and bring it all together in a GIS to work out who is at risk and what could we do to reduce this risk. A typical day can always be away from the office putting it into practice – so installing lake sensors, or time lapse cameras that track hillslope moving, or carrying out mapping/surveying. There are not that many days that are the same, part of what I love about Geography as we get to use so many skills that you may think of as ‘Geography’ – i’m part engineer, cartographer, modeller, coder, remote sensor, risk communicator etc