My first fieldwork from the OU, in 2005, was pollen trapping on the Galapagos. Here I am looking beardy on Bainbridge.
February was an exciting month for me principally because of the finalization of my move to the University of Amsterdam (UvA) where I will become head of Paleo and Landscape Ecology in September. The decision to leave The Open University (OU) has been a difficult one. When I joined the OU as a RCUK Research Fellow in Ecosystem Science in 2005 I would not have believed that I would be in a position to take on a job such as the one in Amsterdam only nine years later. Building the group here during the last nine years has been a lot of fun and I have got to work with some great people. Stand out moments include:
- Obtaining my first grant as Principle Investigator (c. US$20,000 from the National Geographic for field work in Bolivia),
- Recruiting, and graduating, my first PhD research students (Joe Williams and Macarena Cardenas),
- Being invited to participate in large international research efforts (notably the Lake Bosumtwi project),
- Co-editing my first book (Bush et al., 2011), having my first student to publish a paper getting it in Science (Cardenas et al., 2011), and helping to write a popular science text co-published by the Natural History Museum (Silvertown et al., 2011)
There have been many more amazing things here but I don’t want to swamp this post with a retrospective of my OU career…
Ongoing excitement within the PCRG is happening on a number of fronts:
Ecology of the past 