Having started as an undergrad in Palaeontology and Evolution here at Bristol, I began my PhD with Gavin Foster at the University of Southampton in 2010. My PhD thesis focussed on the ground-truthing, calibration and development of the boron isotope-pH proxy, which is now one of the primary ways that we reconstruct CO2 levels in the past beyond the ice core record. This involved live cultures in the Red Sea in collaboration with Jonathan Erez, and sea-going research in the South Pacific with Helen Bostock. 

After a brief six month post-doc in Southampton, I moved to Yale to take up a post-doc in Pincelli Hull's group, where I set up boron isotope analytical methods in Noah Planavsky's lab, and applied the proxy to questions related to the Cretaceous-Palaeogene mass extinction and the recovery of biogeochemical function after bolide impact. 

After 3.5 years at Yale I moved to the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam, where I headed the Helmholtz Laboratory for the Geochemistry of the Earth Surface (HELGES) Trace Metal Clean labs. Working within Friedhelm von Blanckenburg's Earth Surface Geochemistry section I moved into more terrestrial carbon cycling questions, looking at controls on chemical weathering and changes in weathering on geological timescales (incorporating Si, Li, and Mg isotopes amongst others). Toward the end of my 5 years at GFZ I was granted an ERC Consolidator Grant (www.petrarch-project.science) to look at the biogeochemical drivers of global ocean anoxia during the late Cretaceous Ocean Anoxic Events (OAEs), which begins here in Bristol in February 2023.