My primary research expertise, originating in my PhD work, is in the transport and fate of contaminants and colloids in soils and porous media. Through my time at Liverpool (2012-17) this work focused on applications in the nuclear industry and in environmental radioactivity, in collaboration with National Nuclear Laboratories in the UK and with partners in the UK, Japan and Taiwan. Past collaborators in Liverpool include Dr Andrew Boston (Physics), Dr James Cooper and Prof Neil Macdonald (both Environmental Sciences).

 

At Sheffield Hallam, my interests have broadened to encompass field-based hydrology and increasingly hydro-sociology, working with Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust to monitor Natural Flood Management interventions in small catchments on the Eastern Pennines around Sheffield. This has led to a range of exciting new applied and interdisciplinary research avenues, including an AHRC-funded collaboration on art and co-design in landscape decision-making, with Dr Niamh Downing, Prof Harriet Tarlo (SHU) and a network of academics, community and professional partners.

 

I have a track-record of research activity across the environmental geosciences. My early postdoctoral work was in soil- and waterborne pathogens and human health (invited paper in Bulletin of the World Health Organization), numerical and agent-based simulation of soil biogeochemical processes, and colloid transport and fate in porous media (including collaboration with Dr Claire Corkhill, Immobilisation Science Lab, The University of Sheffield). I also have strong interests in catchment-scale water and contaminant dynamics, in particular in semi-arid catchments in the Middle East (Jordan) and in application to supraglacial and pro-glacial environments. I have a longstanding interest in glacier surface processes (collaboration with Dr Tris Irvine-Fynn, Aberystwyth), particularly in the dynamics of sediments, biocolloids and chemical fate and transport in the weathering crust of glaciers.

 

My most recent work has involved collaboration with a team of Syrian academics supported by the Council for At-Risk Academics (Cara), who have collected the first regional baseline soil survey in North-West Syria since before the start of the Civil War in 2011.