Northumberland

I grew up in the lovely county of Northumberland in northeast England. My dad (who taught and researched urban redvelopment) was an early enthusiast of what we would now call “rewilding”, and I spent much of my childhood watching plants colonize the tangled garden behind our house, or walking in the nearby Lake District. At school I became fascinated by the successional ecophysiology of sand dunes — particularly how plants not only create increasingly fertile conditions for their competitors, but also fundamentally reshape the land itself.

Oxford

I studied Biological Sciences at Oxford University (Balliol College), specializing in Ecology and Plant Science. My mentor at Oxford, Myles Axton triggered an interest in complex systems theory. I received a Coolidge scholarship to travel to the US after graduating, and a and a chance visit to Bill Lipscomb, in Santa Fe, NM, introduced to me the concept of climate models and solidified the thought that helping to predict how plants affect the functioning of the Earth system was the path I needed to follow.

Edinburgh

I pursued my graduate studies in Edinburgh, which then and now had a very large cluster of scientists working on ecophysiological research and the functioing of the biosphere in the Earth system. I was fortunate to coincide with my PhD advisors Mat Williams, Patrick Meir and Yadvinder Malhi, with whom I worked using ecohydroligical theory and observations to understand how the Amazon rainforest might respond to forseen droughts. Our experiment at Caxiuanã became the world’s longest-running ecosystem drought experiment (finally ending in 2024!).

Sheffield

After my PhD — and a short postdoc climbing trees with Maurizio Mencuccini and Jordi Martínez Vilalta — I moved to Sheffield to work on a project co-led by several of the pioneers of the first global vegetation models (Peter Cox, Colin Prentice, Ian Woodward, and Stephen Sitch). The premise was that since their inception, the lack of representation of ecological processes (growth, competition, succesion and mortality) has limited the utility of these models and their ability to act as useful ‘digital twins’ of the terrestrial biosphere. Motivated to correct this, and to allow the fundamental properties of plants (traits) shape their predicted distribution and response to climate, I began implementing the Ecosystem Demography (ED) model in to the land-surface scheme of the UK Met Office climate model, through collaboration with Paul Moorcroft’s group at Harvard, and later merging ED with Drew Purves ideas on canopy self-organization.

New Mexico (LANL)

Early models of vegetation dynamics have very simplified models of plant mortality, and did not reflect emerging understanding of how plants move water and regulate water loss while still taking up carbon for growth. In 2008 Nate McDowell published a hugely influential framework for understanding drought-induced plant mortality and the trade-offs between hydraulic failure and carbon starvation, also based on his work with drought experiments in the New Mexican desert. I moved to New Mexico, and Los Alamos National Laboratory and with Nate worked on developing data–model systems capable of testing these ideas and integrating them into Earth System Models.

Colorado (NCAR)

Developing complex models of the Earth system is urgent, but how the biosphere of the Earth interacts with its climate is densely complex and interdisciplinary problem. Without collaboration across disciplines, dedicated code maintenance, and a strong expectation of open science principles, much effort is wasted and progress is squandered. In 2010 I was offered a job I never dared to imagine I could have, as a staff scientist in the Terrestrial Sciences Section of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

Toulouse, France

Oslo, Norway