School of Ocean Sciences

Research Environment

SOS is a constituent School within the College of Natural Sciences (CNS). CNS is very strongly allied to CEH-Bangor) (NERC, a collaboration recently supported by a NERC investment of £3.3M to build Environment Centre Wales, a building facilitating multidisciplinary research in the heart of Bangor University (project cost £8.0M) which includes SOS researchers.

SOS has a research exchange scheme with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), USA, externally funded by the Drapers' Company, and attracts eminent visiting marine scientists, many on the Sir Kirby Laing Visiting Fellowship. Since 2001 these visitors have included including Douglas Jones (Florida), Mark Luckenback (VIMS), Roger Mann (VIMS), Jim O’Donnell (Connecticut), Tom Osborn (John Hopkins), Stefan Rahmstorf (Potsdam), Larry Sanford (Maryland), Katsuto Uehara (Kyushu), Tony Underwood (Sydney) and Don Wright (VIMS).

Since 2001 we have appointed nine young early career stage staff following the retirement of senior staff. Careful succession planning has maximised potential to develop multidisciplinarity and enhance seagoing research, resulting in the appointment of a cohort of dynamic, research-active, seagoing marine scientists including McCarthy (2002), Hiddink, Jenkins, Neill, Papadimitriou (2006), Baas, Malham, Giménez and Rippeth (2007). These early career staff have been joined by Professor Steve Hawkins (2007), former Director of the Marine Biological Association of the UK (Plymouth). Our new appointments have energised the research culture in SOS, evidenced by recent successful NERC research grant capture (December 2006 round); Davies/Jago with Baas, £466k for sediment dynamics; Jago/Simpson with Bowers, £462k for marine optics; Thomas, £126k for sea ice, and Kennedy, £221k for ikaite, plus an additional £281k Urgency Grant for Lyme Bay marine reserve, Hiddink with Kaiser; and in the award to Thomas with Williams of over £1M from two industrial sources in 2006-2008 for research into biofuels from marine algae. During the period of assessment, Hawkins and Jenkins also held ca £2.2 million including 8 NERC awards mainly at MBA, jointly supervised 19 PhD completions and produced over 90 ISI publications.