Dr Tamsin Mather
Tamsin Mather studied Natural Sciences at St John's College, Cambridge specialising in Chemistry. She then spent a year doing an M.Phil. in the History and Philosophy of Science. After spending a year out of academia, amongst other things travelling and doing work placements at BBC Science in London and the EU Commission in Brussels, she returned to Cambridge to study for a PhD in the Department of Earth Sciences. She then spent three months on secondment to the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology in Westminster writing a report on carbon capture and storage before returning to Cambridge as a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow. In 2006, she moved to the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford to combine her Royal Society Fellowship with a Research Councils UK Academic Fellowship in the Physics and Chemistry of the Earth and Environment. She is also currently a fellow of University College.
Tamsin's research interests include the role that volcanism plays in cycling material between the solid Earth and its atmosphere and the impacts of volcanic activity on the environment. She recently discovered a previously unappreciated role of volcanism in the global nitrogen cycle which may have important implications in terms of the abundance of biologically available nitrogen on the early Earth during the first stages of the evolution of life. With colleagues she has also made important steps towards understanding how volcanic eruptions can lead to stratospheric ozone depletion and the chemistry of environmentally important species such as mercury, halogens and sulphur in volcanic plumes.
Tamsin's most recent research has been as part of a team looking at volcanic hazards in southern Chile, especially those following the 2008 eruption of Chaitén volcano. While devastating to the local population and environment this eruption has allowed the team to build up a dataset to test and improve models of ash dispersion (which will lead to better prediction of ash-related hazards worldwide) and to study how the environment on a regional scale responds to ash fallout on this scale.
