Meet the scientists!

I’m a geologist / micropalaeontologist, this means I look at fossils which are tiny!

I spend most of my time looking at a group of microfossils called “foraminifera”, these are single celled organisms which build a calcium carbonate shell in isotopic equilibrium with sea water. This means the chemistry of the animal’s shell is the same as the water it lives in. So by taking the fossilised foraminifera and looking at the proportions of oxygen and carbon in the shell we can find out what the oceans were like in the past. 

I normally work a 10 hour day, 6 days a week. It’s hard work doing a PhD! But it’s worth the long hours when you start to get results.

My day usually starts at 8am with a strong cup of coffee, and a long list of emails to answer. Most of my time is spent behind a microscope, picking my tiny fossils out of sediment samples ready to be vaporised in the mass spectrometer, but I have some cool speakers in the lab so I can plug my ipod and blast the tunes out whilst I’m slaving away. I also spend a lot of time helping run practical sessions for the undergraduates at the university. I teach palaeontology, and practical geology, and mineralogy.

Most days I finish around 7pm (unless I have a presentation to prepare or paper to write, in which case, it’s not uncommon for me to work all night!) and then hang out at the pub with the other PhD students for a couple of hours before going home and falling into bed. Ready to do it all again the next day!

It’s not all late nights and labwork though because as a geologist I get to travel the world and see some amazing rocks!