Overview
The title of my PhD is ‘Modelling the role of biodiversity in ecosystem resilience to climate change'. In particular, I will be looking at similarities and differences between tropical forests and coral reefs. I am supervised by Professor Peter Cox at the University of Exeter, and Professor Pete Mumby at the University of Queensland, under the QUEX institute.
So far, I have worked with Peter Cox on a toy model of an ecosystem looking at general relationships between biodiversity, evolution and fitness in a changing environment, finding critical rates of change under which the ecosystem persisted. I have recently started exploring a fish-foodsource model with Pete Mumby, initially focusing on the varied diets of parrotfish, with plans to investigate how the different components of the model are affected by future changes in environment.
I completed my undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Physics (MSci) at the University of Bristol. I then worked for a short period at the Met Office, compiling a report on land surface temperature biases in semi-arid regions in the JULES model.
