Nottinghamshire, England, United Kingdom
Tom is an engineering geologist/geomorphologist with an interest in geohazards; landslides in particular. He studied at physical geography at Utrecht University (NL). He has since worked at a number of universities, including Utrecht (NL), Leicester (UK), Sussex (UK), Loughborough (UK), worked at the British Geological Survey (UK) and is now back at Loughborough. This saw him move from a strong base in physical geography (including Quaternary geology, alpine geomorphology, palynology and soil science) via civil engineering (geotechnics/soil mechanics) to engineering geology. He has worked extensively in China on landslide mechanisms in Lanzhou loess and geohazards in S-Gansu (e.g. the 2010 Zhouqu debris flow disaster). Other fieldwork/research includes collapsible silts, lime stabilisation, resilience assessment of UK transport infrastructure networks (in the EPSRC-funded FUTURENET and iSMART projects), and forecasting slope instability in a context of climate change (e.g. through the UK CLIFFS network). Further multi-disciplinary research was stimulated through projects including the GCRF-funded PSB (Promoting Safer Building) project and the NERC-funded SHEAR LANDSLIP project. The interplay between disciplines such as structural engineering, architecture, social science and geoscience in the PSB project was particularly stimulating and eye-opening. Tom is very interested in long term slope stability issues in the landscape veneer in a context of climate change. He is developing water balance models with an acceptable complexity that have a reasonable correspondence with reality that can be used to issue national daily landslide hazard assessments. This will take some time. To unwind Tom creates stone sculptures. Tom sits on the Boards of Engineering Geology and the Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society, London, and a member International Association of Engineering Geology and the Environment.