Meet our faculty

Do you want to learn from leading experts?

You will be taught by world-leading academics, who are at the forefront of research in a diverse range of subjects; from extreme weather event attribution, to environmental health and enthnography; from geomorphology to gender studies.

Ben Gardner

"I love the fact that, every lecture I have at Oxford, I know I'm being taught by a world expert. Sometimes they've literally written the book on the subject."
Benedict, Geography undergraduate

Name	College(s)	Summary of Research Interests
Dr Ariell Ahearn Departmental Lecturer in Human Geography	St Antony's College	Ariell's current research aims to understand the relationship between social systems, resource distribution and governance frameworks in regions undergoing economic transformation.
Professor Myles Allen Professor of Geosystem Science	Linacre College	How human and natural influences on climate contribute to observed climate change and risks of extreme weather and in quantifying their implications for long-range climate forecasts.
Professor Richard Bailey Professor of Environmental Systems	St Catherine's College	Quaternary palaeoclimate; geochronology (particularly luminescence-based methods) associated with environmental change, archaeology and palaeoanthrolpology; modelling luminescence processes; observations and modelling of vegetation patterning and critical thresholds in semi-arid systems; critical thresholds in environmental systems.
Dr Janet Banfield College Lecturer	Hertford College	The role of implicit or pre-reflective registers of experience in processes of material transformation that generate subjectivities (both human and nonhuman) and spatialities.
Dr Peter Barbrook-Johnson Departmental Research Lecturer in the Economics of Environmental Change	St Catherine's College	Pete's core research interests sit at the crossroads of social science and economics, complexity science, and environmental and energy policy. He uses a range of methods in his research including agent-based modelling, network analysis, and systems mapping. He regularly uses these, and other methods, to explore applied social, economic, and policy questions, and to support complexity-appropriate policy evaluation, but is equally interested in more theoretical aspects of complex adaptive systems.
Dr Ben Caldecott Director, Oxford Sustainable Finance Group and the Lombard Odier Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow	Oriel College	Sustainable finance and investment topics, including: active ownership, the carbon bubble, climate finance, conservation finance, disclosure, divestment, engagement, ESG, green banks, green bonds, green benchmarks and indices, impact investing, public private partnerships, reporting, responsible investment, stranded assets, and green taxonomies.
Professor Simon Dadson Professor of Hydrology	Christ Church	Processes that link climate, hydrology, and geomorphology.
Professor Patricia Daley Professor of the Human Geography of Africa	Jesus College	Sub-Saharan Africa, especially topics on issues of forced migration; humanitarianism; gender; militarism; violence and ethnicity; as well as on aspects of political ecology in relation to land tenure; natural resource exploitation; community management of natural resources; forestry; indigenous knowledge; and wildlife conservation.
Professor Danny Dorling Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography	St Peter's College	Issues of housing, health, employment, education, wealth and poverty.
Dr Julie Durcan Researcher	Brasenose College	Palaeoenvironmental reconstruction in low latitude regions, reconstructing socio-environmental relationships in the late Quaternary period, and the development and application of the optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating technique.
Dr Sebastian Engelstaedter Researcher	No college affiliation	The processes that link the atmosphere and the surface in desert environments with a focus on the dust cycle (emission, transport and deposition of of mineral dust).
Dr Hannah Fair Departmental Lecturer in Human Geography	No college affiliation	Contemporary environment-society relations. At the heart of her research are questions of how to live well with anthropogenically transformed and transforming natures, and how to enact ethical responsibility for the inequitable distribution of these harmful transformations across different societies and species.
Dr Fiona Ferbrache College Lecturer	Keble College	Mobilities, in the context of Europe and the European Union (EU); and relations between certain forms of mobility and sociologies of European integration
Dr Kevin Grecksch Departmental Lecturer and Course Director, MSc/MPhil in Water Science, Policy and Management	Wolfson College	Normative and analytical aspects of governance, especially with regard to water and climate change adaptation. (Multilevel) environmental governance, water governance, climate change adaptation, governance of societal transformation processes, property rights and the governance of natural resources, sustainability and ecological economics. Why and how power relationships, institutions and knowledge shape the governance of water and climate change.
Dr Beth Greenhough Associate Professor in Human Geography	Keble College	Social implications of scientific innovations in the areas of health, biomedicine and the environment; Social, cultural and ethical processes through which humans and animals are made available as experimental subjects for biomedical research; New theoretical and methodological approaches within Geography better able to capture the material and affective dimensions of human-environment relations and how these are being reconfigured through biotechnological innovation.
Dr Richard Grenyer Associate Professor in Biodiversity and Biogeography	Jesus College	Conservation - in particular conservation strategy, systematic conservation planning, biodiversity measurement and valuation. Biogeography, ecology and evolutionary ecology - particularly of mammals and plants. Phylogeography and phyloinformatics.
Professor Jim Hall Professor of Climate and Environmental Risks	Linacre College	Water resource systems, flooding and adaptation to climate change. Resilience of infrastructure systems modelling and policy analysis. Decision making under uncertainty. Risk analysis.
Dr Sam Hampton Researcher	Wolfson College	The governance of energy and climate change
Dr Neil Hart Departmental Lecturer in Physical Geography and Career Development Fellow	Christ Church	Weather-climate interactions, particularly in the subtropical hydroclimates. Dynamical processes underpinning regional climate change. The upscale impact of convective hotspots on regional circulation. Climate dynamics of African regions. Extreme weather risks.
Dr Debbie Hopkins Associate Professor in Human Geography	Kellogg College	The mobilities of people, things and ideas; decarbonising the transport system; intersections of decarbonisation, equity and justice; mobile labour; gendered mobilities; climate change adaptation; urban flood risks.
Dr Ian Klinke Associate Professor in Human Geography	St John's College	Geopolitics and political geography, Germany, the Cold War, military landscapes, biopolitics, far-right politics, intellectual history, European integration.
Dr Sneha Krishnan Associate Professor in Human Geography	Brasenose College	Feminist/queer studies, cities in the global South, geo-and biopolitics, childhood and youth, colonial and postcolonial geographies, South Asia.
Professor Anna Lora-Wainwright Professor of the Human Geography of China	St Cross College	Environmental justice, environmental health controversies, transition and social change in China, anthropological theory and ethnography. More specific topics: political ecology with particular interest in pollution and rural China, popular epidemiology and perceptions of risk, questioning the lay-expert divide, grassroots responses to health inequalities (especially in China and the developing world), cross-cultural environmental activism and environmental health activism, controversies in cancer epidemiology and lay cancer epidemiology.
Professor Jamie Lorimer Professor of Environmental Geography	Hertford College	More-than-human geographies. Cultures and politics of Nature, especially in relation to wildlife conservation and rewilding. Social studies of the microbiome. The cultures and politics of the Anthropocene. Animal studies and nonhuman charisma. Elephants.
Dr Marc Macias-Fauria Associate Professor in Physical Geography	St Peter's College	Biogeosciences. Ecologist with a special focus on cold environments. Coupling of physical and biological systems over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Study of ecological and biogeographic processes through the use and interpretation of long-term and palaeoecological records, modelling, and remote sensing.
Professor Yadvinder Malhi Professor of Ecosystem Science	Oriel College	Interactions between forest ecosystems, climate change and land-use change, including the utility of forest protection in mitigating climate change. Techniques applied in this research include plant ecophysiology, long term forest monitoring and short-term expeditions, forest micrometerological and flux measurements, manipulative experiments, and satellite remote sensing of intact forests and deforestation. His interests are global, but particularly focus on tropical forests, especially in the Andes and Amazon, and more recently on the woodlands of the Upper Thames.
Dr Fiona McConnell Associate Professor in Human Geography	St Catherine's College	Political geography and critical geopolitics. Specifically the everyday construction of statehood and sovereignty in cases of tenuous territoriality (e.g. unrecognised/de facto states, exile governments, stateless nations). Theories of sovereignty, and the relationship between territory and authority. Theories of the state and the use of ethnographic methods to uncover everyday state practices. Diplomacy, minority communities and the UN system.
Professor Derek McCormack Professor of Cultural Geography	Mansfield College	Geographies of: air/atmosphere; the body, performance and movement; affect and emotion; art, experiment, and creativity; material cultures. Social/cultural theories and philosophies of space and time, particularly non-representational theory and post-structuralism.
Dr Caitlin McElroy Departmental Research Lecturer	No college affiliation	Improving the sustainability and development of resource driven economies, advancing the circular economy of mineral resources, and the complicated relationships between finance, equality, and environmental services (cooling and water) in developed and developing economies.
Dr Janey Messina Associate Professor in Quantitative Social Science Methods	Green Templeton College	Quantitative health geography, medical geography, spatial epidemiology, disease ecology, geography of infectious diseases.
Dr Jennie Middleton Senior Research Fellow in Mobilities and Human Geography	Kellogg College	Geographies of mobilities; care in the city; and innovative methodologies for urban research.
Dr Nick Middleton College Lecturer	St Anne's College	The nature and human use of deserts and their margins, environments commonly referred to collectively as drylands.
Dr Alex Money Director, Innovative Infrastructure Investment Programme, SSEE	St Catherine's College	Economic and financial geography. Investment models to improve sustainable development outcomes. Sector interests: water, energy, food, work, infrastructure. Thematic interests: investment pathways, ESG, alternative data. Specialist interests: sub-saharan Africa, earth observation, asset management.
Dr Jasper Montana Research Fellow in Human Geography	Hertford College	The nature and human use of deserts and their margins, environments commonly referred to collectively as drylands.
Dr Amber Murrey Associate Professor in Human Geography	Mansfield College	Decolonial political geographies and political ecologies. Politics of extraction and lived or embodied experiences of extraction, particularly in African societies and the global South. Geographies of resistance. Structural violence and geographies of violence. Decolonial thought and non-western epistemologies. Digital disruptions, cyber-protest and political geographies of the Internet. Queering development, post-development, decolonising development. Geopolitics of knowledge and movements to decolonise knowledge, particularly within universities or the social sciences.
Dr Anna Plyushteva Departmental Research Lecturer in Transport Studies	St Antony's College	Geographies of urban transport and mobility; Qualitative and mixed research methods in transport geography; Transport and mobility from the perspective of gender and the household; Night-time urban mobilities; Links between commuting practices and workplace social relations; Sociological and anthropological perspectives on how we pay for transport services; Cities and mobilities in South-Eastern Europe.
Dr Jennifer Richards College Lecturer	St John's College	How environmental processes shape the landscape around us and how they interact with heritage sites.
Professor Gillian Rose Professor of Human Geography	St John's College	Geographies of contemporary visual culture, digitally-produced images and visual methodologies. I'm particularly interested in how new forms of digitally-mediated imagery and practices are emerging in both popular practices and in new design professions; in smart cities; and in critical modes of investigating and theorising these shifts. Also critical urban geography, histories of visual and other cultural practice, and critical cultural geographies more broadly.
Dr Tim Schwanen Professor of Transport Studies	St Anne's College	The everyday mobility of people, goods and information, and in particular: transitions to low carbon mobility and living in cities, with a specific focus on questions of social justice and governance; the rise and governance of smart, shared or autonomous mobility; the interactions between transport infrastructure development and socio-spatial inequalities; the effects of urban contexts on individuals' practices and experiences of mobility; the relationship between mobility, power and subject formation.
Dr Louise Slater Associate Professor in Physical Geography	Hertford College	Flood processes; rivers; fluvial geomorphology; hydrology; climate; computation. Research topics: Detection and attribution of changes in flood processes and hydrological extremes (e.g. disentangling climatic versus land cover drivers); understanding and predicting how river channels and their networks adjust dynamically to shifting land cover and climate regimes; developing new statistical, mathematical or machine learning approaches for better forecasting major hydro-climatic events in the future. Research methodologies: data-driven, computer-based analyses; data science, statistical modelling, machine learning, satellite remote sensing.
Dr Linda Speight Departmental Lecturer in Physical Geography	Hertford College	Linda is a hydrometeorologist whose research seeks to develop early warning systems to improve disaster risk management, particularly for flooding. She is interested in global flood forecasting, surface water flood forecasting, ensemble forecasts, impact-based forecasts, risk communication, decision making and climate resilience.
Professor David S.G. Thomas Professor of Geography	Hertford College	Quaternary environments in the low latitudes, especially Africa; luminescence dating applications; aeolain systems; land degradation and human-environment interactions in drylands and Africa; climate change impacts and adaptation.
Dr Alex Vasudevan Associate Professor in Human Geography	Christ Church	Critical urban geography: alternative urbanisms, radical politics and the geographies of protest: contemporary urbanisation and precarious living: the history of squatting and its relationship to broader currents in contemporary urban thinking: spatial theory and experimentation: cultural geographies of artistic practice: historical and cultural geographies of performance.
Professor Heather Viles Professor of Biogeomorphology and Heritage Conservation	Worcester College	Geomorphology and environmental change (especially in arid and karst environments); building stone deterioration and conservation; weathering and rock breakdown (especially in arid, coastal, karst and other extreme environments); rock breakdown on Mars and other planets.
Professor Richard Washington Professor of Climate Science	Keble College	African climate science; climate change and variability in Africa; rainfall variability and prediction in Africa; mineral aerosol (dust) production and transport in Africa.
Dr Lisa Wedding Associate Professor in Physical Geography	St Hilda's College	Applying a geospatial approach at the intersection of science and policy to solve environmental problems. Her overall approach to research and problem solving weaves together theoretical approaches from the disciplines of landscape ecology, conservation biology and applies geospatial analytical tools and techniques.
Professor Dame Sarah Whatmore Professor of Environment and Public Policy	Keble College	The production and contestation of environmental knowledges/technologies; political theory at the intersection of democratic and scientific institutions and practices, including the constitution of publics and property rights; alternative moral economies - particularly as these relate to food; land-use and bioresources. She is particularly interested in working with students exploring feminist and post-structuralist philosophies and / or transdisciplinary approaches.
Professor Giles Wiggs Professor of Aeolian Geomorphology	Brasenose College	Measuring and modelling aeolian processes in deserts with an emphasis on aeolian sediment transport; sand dune dynamics; dynamics of aeolian dust; desert geomorphology; and low latitude environmental change. Research techniques include fieldwork in southern Africa, Middle East, Central Asia and Australia in combination with wind tunnel and computer modelling. Enquiries concerning any aspect of desert geomorphology are welcomed.
Dr Katrin Wilhelm Researcher	St Antony's College	The intersections of cultural and natural heritage perception and preservation. She investigates rock and stone material responses to the natural and anthropogenic environment, with further links to sustainable urban built heritage and well-being.
Professor Dariusz Wójcik Professor of Economic Geography	St Peter's College	Geographies of finance, economic geography, financial centres and global cities (including Shanghai and Dubai), emerging market economies, corporate governance, environmental finance (including carbon markets), varieties and models of capitalism, geography of advanced business services (including finance, law, management consultancy and accountancy).
Dr Monika Zurek Senior Researcher	Reuben College	Food systems, environment and development interactions in research and international organizations as well as in the consulting and the philanthropic sector.