Teaching

Open Days: Are you interested in the physics, biology or chemistry of the oceans? Would you like to know what we teach and how we teach it? Visit the University during an Open Day to meet our staff, hear about the science of the oceans and learn about our degree programmes. More details. My main teaching responsibilities are: Year 1: ENVS104 (Key Skills) I contribute to initial tutorials for Ocean Sciences students. Year 2: ENVS204 (Research and Career Skills) This is the year 2 tutorial module. I organise the main semester 2 assignment on scientific data plotting and report writing, using data from the northeast New Zealand shelf to investigate wind- driven upwelling of cold, nutrinet-rich water. ENVS245 (Oceanography, Plankton and Climate) I teach this jointly with Prof. Claire Mahaffey. Our aim is to get students to step outside their experience as terrestrial animals, and instead think about how planktonic marine life deals with the challenges of living in a dense, turbulent fluid.We begin with the inherent “stickiness” of seawater experienced by planktonic life, and then move on to look at how plankton live in different ocean environments (e.g. the shallow shelf seas, the shelf edge, the open ocean), how plankton influence Earth’s climate, and how our changing climate is affecting plankton distributions. Year 3: ENVS349 (Sea Practical) Jointly taught by Prof. Claire Mahaffey, Dr. Pascal Salaun, Dr. Hannah Whitby and me. Students are taken to NW Scotland, to carry out boat-based surveys investigating the oceanography and biogeochemistry of the Firth of Clyde and adjacent Clyde Sea. ENVS306 (Independent Research Project) All ocean sciences staff offer research projects to year 3 students. I generally supervise projects that use data collected during my own research expeditions, or that use simple numerical models of ocean physics and biogeochemstry.