I work on mass extinctions. Over the past twenty years I have been lucky enough to travel to >30 countries to collect rocks and fossils that help me and my collaborators understand what drove some of the greatest biotic catastrophes of the past ~444 million years. In the past few years I have been working on three crises that occurred between the Middle Permian (~262 Ma) and end Triassic (~201 Ma) - an interval of extremes of climate, extinction and evolution. My focus has been the Boreal Realm of northern high latitudes and I have spent a lot of time in the Canadian and Russian Arctic and Svalbard. In a bid to do fieldwork somewhere warmer I am a Co-Investigator on a large NERC-funded project gathering data on evolution, extinction and environmental change through the entire Devonian Period in northern Spain.
Prior to moving to Hull I worked at the Norwegian Polar Institute in Tromsø, and before that, down the M62 in Leeds. As well as collecting rocks from interesting places, like many a geologist I like cricket and beer. I have qualifications in both!