Which are you?
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Matthew’s career has taken him across continents. Proud to hail from Manchester, where he spent his youth, he completed a BSc in Physical Geography at University of London in the late 1980s and a PhD in Glacial Geology at University of Edinburgh. After his doctorate, he worked at English Nature, the former government department responsible for conservation before taking up his first academic post at University of Greenwich in 1992. He is a Member of the British Science Association, the Quaternary Research Association and the International Glaciological Society.
Matthew moved to BU in 2002 where his focus on geological research has produced ground-breaking results. He’s a Quaternary Sedimentologist and Geomorphologist – someone who studies the landforms and sediments of the last 2 million years, essentially those of the last Ice Age. More recently, he has developed an interest in human evolution and ichnology - the study of trace fossils such as human and animal footprints. He is best known for his recent fieldwork in Kenya at the second oldest footprint site in the world, where fossil prints were attributed to Homo Erectus. The research was published in Science, one of the world’s top-rated journals. “Something I’m really proud of,” says Matthew. He also has an interesting research sideline as the world's expert in building the perfect sandcastle and Bournemouth University’s location on the stunning south coast of England is the perfect place to practice this ‘art’. He has also contributed to television programmes such as Coast (BBC, 2007) and Fossil Detectives (BBC, 2008).
It’s a good job he likes to travel. His work has taken him to far-flung places. Cold – such as Norway, Greenland, Svalbard, Canada, Alaska, and Iceland in the High Arctic where he worked on a range of glacial projects from the structural geology of surge-type glaciers through to the sedimentology of subglacial volcanoes. And hot – more recently he’s been working in Central America and Africa on a range of Quaternary projects reconstructing environmental change.
His role as an international academic working in hostile regions poses some serious challenges and logistical problems. He once fried over £20K’s worth of optical laser scanner via a poorly repaired generator, but only after having transported it over 4,000 miles. He’s seen some scary moments: notably avoiding being eaten by a polar bear and coming face-to-face with his lifelong fear when he narrowly missed stepping on a cobra.
When he gets time off he heads to his spiritual home, the Welsh hills, and his way of relaxing is revealing: “I can think of nothing better than sitting under a tree reading a good crime novel and writing fiction myself,” says Matthew.
So, what is the biggest pressing issue the world faces in his area of research right now? “We know very little about human evolution; the fossil record is fragmentary, argued over and poorly understood. My current work is essential to our collective understanding of who we are as a species and how we walked.”
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