Stephen Darby

I am a Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Southampton. I completed my PhD at the University of Nottingham in 1994 before moving to work as a Royal Society Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Florence (Italy) and then as a Research Geologist at the US Department of Agriculture's National Sedimentation Laboratory in Oxford, Mississippi. In 1997 I returned to the UK, taking up a lectureship in the Department of Geography at Southampton where I have worked since. I now hold a personal chair in fluvial geomorphology and am head of the department. I am an active researcher with a number of interests, most notably in studies of river bank erosion, the hydrology and geomorphology of the world's largest rivers, as well as studies of gravity-driven flows in the world's oceans. In recent years I have also become interested in understanding how river flooding and sedimentation affects agricultural production and livelihoods in the Global South. Fundamentally, I am interested in how environmental change affects the shape of the surface of Earth and in turn how this affects humanity's ability to have a sustainable future.