Mr David Ball
Mr David Ball is a Hydrogeologist. His primary degree was in Natural Sciences (Geology) from TCD in 1971. His Masters in Hydrogeology is from London University in 1972. He has worked as a consultant since then.
Initially, he worked on long projects overseas in Africa, Arabia and Asia. He jointly directed and supervised a $10 million drilling investigation in Arabia for four years, and specialised in hydrochemistry and environmental isotopes. He subsequently was part of a team that set up and trained a Groundwater Research Department for Malaysia, and National Water Resources Institute for Nigeria.
He returned to Ireland in 1985, and, with others, set up an on-campus consultancy which grew to over thirty staff. In 1992, he left to work as an independent hydrogeologist. Most of his work since 1985 has been in Ireland; for regulatory and local authorities, industries, farmers and local groups, on matters relating to groundwater supplies, development of new water sources, drilling standards and planning. He has continued to work overseas for short periods in North Korea, Sudan, Somalia, Chad, Malaysia, Spain and Mali. He has been the President of the Irish Group of the IAH. He was elected to the RIA Geosciences Committee in 2004.
Dr David Chew
Dr David Chew studied geology at University College Dublin, obtaining his B.Sc. in 1996 and his Ph.D. in 2001. His Ph.D. research involved structural mapping and geochronology of an Early Palaeozoic arc-continent collision zone in western Ireland. On completion of his Ph.D., he took up a temporary lectureship in the Department of Geology in Trinity College Dublin for two years. From 2003 – 2005 he was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Geneva on a project that involved deciphering the tectonic history of the pre-Andean margin of Peru. He returned to Trinity College Dublin in late 2005 to take up a lectureship. He lectures in the field of structural geology and tectonics, and supervises four Ph.D. students. His research interests involve applying geochronology and thermochronology to a variety of geological problems, including isotopic dating of sedimentation, exhumation studies in the East African rift and the timing of orogenesis in ancient orogenic belts (the Caledonides and Andes).
webpage: http://www.tcd.ie/Geology/staff/chewd/index.php
Professor John Gamble
John Gamble is Professor of Geology at University College Cork. John came to Cork in mid 2002 from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand where he has been since 1980. John completed a PhD at the Queen’s University of Belfast and moved to New South Wales, Australia in January 1974. He subsequently moved to Wellington in 1980 and was awarded a DSc by Queen’s University in 2000. His research interests are in the petrology and geochemistry of igneous rocks. He has more than 100 peer-reviewed publications in topics ranging from low grade metamorphism to rhyolitic volcanism, mantle geochemistry, monitoring volcanic gases and time-scales of volcanism on andesite volcanoes. He has experience of 7 field seasons in Antarctica and others associated with voyages of discovery to uninhabited oceanic islands. He has had a glacier, a volcanic cone and a submarine volcano named in his honour and was awarded the Polar Medal of the United States of America. In 2010 he was elected to Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Society of New Zealand and is presently Chairperson of the Academy Geosciences Committee.
Professor Alan G. Jones
Professor Alan G. Jones MRIA is the Senior Professor and Head of Geophysics at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Professor Jones's primary research interests are in tectonic processes, both those occuring today and those that occurred during the first half of the Earth's history when the Earth was a very different planet from the one we live on. His primary technique for imaging subsurface structures, from depths of 100 m to 1,000 km, is very low frequency, natural electromagnetic waves. Jones combines those EM observations with others from seismology and other geophysics and also from geology, geochemistry, petrology and geochronology to build a tectonic history of a region.
Jones has over 120 papers in top international journals, with over 3,500 citations to those papers. He is the most published and most cited author in his field. Prior to coming to Ireland he spent over 20 years in Canada, and was recognised for his contributions by being awarded the J. Tuzo Wilson medal of the Canadian Geophysical Union in 2006. He was elected to Academia Europaea in 2009, and to the Royal Irish Academy in 2010, where he is a member of the Geosciences Committee.
Professor Jones's full CV and biography can be found on his web pages at: http://homepages.dias.ie/~ajones/
Dr Deirdre Lewis
Dr. Deirdre Lewis is a Technical Director with SLR Consulting, one of Europe’s leading resources consultancies. She graduated in 1982 with a primary degree in Natural Sciences (Geology) from Trinity College Dublin and completed her doctoral studies in TCD in 1986. Since then, she has worked in a number of sectors, primarily mineral exploration, renewable energies and international development. She spent six years working in Australia in base and precious metals exploration, but returned to Ireland in 1996 to commence working with her current employer. Since then she has consulted worldwide, but particularly in Africa, where she has worked on behalf of private clients and for EU, World Bank and UN in mineral exploration, policy, regulation and capacity building for resources management. She is a member of the Royal Irish Academy’s Geoscience Committee and Vice President of the Institute of Geologists in Ireland. In these roles she is active in public outreach and education, and was a member of the Irish IYPE committee.
Dr Stephen McCarron
Dr Stephen McCarron graduated from QUB (BSc. Geography), the Univ. of Leicester (MSc. GIS) and Univ. of Ulster (DPhil). He has been involved in Quaternary research and GIS teaching at the University of Ulster, the Geological Survey of Ireland, Trinity College Dublin, and currently at NUI Maynooth in the Dept. of Geography and ICARUS (http://geography.nuim.ie). He is Secretary and former Chair of the Irish Quaternary Association (IQUA) and a member of the Royal Irish Academy National Geosciences and Geography Committees. His main research interests are in Irish glacial geology, particularly the nature of the last deglaciation (see Coxon and McCarron in The Geology of Ireland, 2nd ed., 2009). To that end he is actively expanding the palaeoenvironmental analysis facilities in NUIM with the addition of a sediment core scanning and analysis facility.
Dr Jennifer McKinley
Dr Jennifer McKinley holds a permanent senior lectureship and research position in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Queen’s University Belfast and is a member of the Environmental Change Research cluster. Primary research interests relate to spatial analysis, comprising GIS and geostatistics, of earth processes, weathering studies and environmental forensics. Dr McKinley is a Chartered Fellow of the Geological Society.
Collaboration with external agencies is an important aspect of Dr McKinley’s work. Significant grant income includes EPSRC funding on Geostatistics in weathering studies; DARD Postgraduate Studentship on ‘Spatial Analysis approaches to modelling water quality in Northern Ireland’ in collaboration with Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute (AFBI); BUFI Postgraduate Studentship ‘Trace element abundance and human epidemiology in Northern Ireland – the Tellus case study’ in collaboration with SPACE, QUB, Cancer Registry NI and senior clinicians in the RVH and split-site studentship with Tellus project, GSNI and University of Alberta on ‘Peat depth models for Northern Ireland and its application to carbon stocks’.
Teaching responsibilities include undergraduate (Level 1, GIS at Level 2 and Level 3), field teaching and co-ordination of Digital Documentation of Heritage modules (GIS and 3D visualization) in a Heritage Science taught postgraduate programme.
Dr Julian Menuge
Dr Julian Menuge BSc (Leicester), PhD (Cantab), PGeo, FGS is a Senior Lecturer in UCD School of Geological Sciences, where he teaches igneous petrology, geochemistry, ore geology and mineralogy. His research interests include geochemical and isotopic studies of the origin of ore deposits, igneous petrogenesis and sediment provenance; he also has an interest in the development of novel isotopic analytical techniques. He has served on the Council of the Irish Geological Association (1986 - 1999), including terms as Treasurer, Vice-President and President. He was involved in the establishment of the Institute of Geologists of Ireland (IGI), serving as its first Secretary (1999 - 2002), and is currently a member of the IGI’s Continuing Professional Development Committee. He was Secretary of, and IGI nominee to, the National Committee for Geology (2000 - 2003). He was elected to the Academy Geosciences Committee in 2004 and served as its Secretary (2004 - 2009). He chaired the organizing committee of an Academy conference “Where will Ireland get its energy?”, which was held in November 2007. He became Vice-Chair of the Geosciences Committee in October 2009.
Mr Eoin Moran
Mr Eoin Moran is Head of the Instrumentation and Environmental Monitoring Division within Met Éireann
In this capacity he coordinates the geophysical and meteorological activities at Valentia Observatory, Met Éireann’s background pollution monitoring programme and the management of Met Éireann’s instrumentation infrastructure (surface, upper-air, radars).
He has been an active member of the outgoing Geosciences committee of the Royal Irish Academy since 2004.
Eoin Moran’s areas of interest include meteorology, atmospheric physics, atmospheric chemistry and geomagnetism
Dr Ian Sanders
Ian Sanders is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geology at Trinity College Dublin. HIs research interests include the deep continental crust and the study of meteorites. He was an editor of 'The Geology of Ireland', he holds strong unconventional views on the formation of planets, and he organized the collection of rock samples as a teaching resource and their distribution to every school in Ireland.
Professor Pat Shannon
Pat Shannon took his BSc and PhD degrees at UCD, where he is Professor of Geology. Having worked at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, the Geological Survey of Ireland and the Petroleum Affairs Division of the Department of Energy he joined the academic staff of UCD in 1983. His was Head of the UCD School of Geological Sciences (and previously the Department of Geology) from 1999 until September 2007. He set up and leads the Marine and Petroleum Geology Research Group at UCD and his research interests ranges from petroleum basin analysis to Neogene sedimentology, with a major focus on the sedimentary basins of the North Atlantic. He has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and has co-authored and co-edited several books on petroleum geology. Pat was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2003 and serves as a member of the Academy’s Geosciences Committee. He is also a member of the Senate of the National University of Ireland, a member of the Governing Authority of UCD and a Research Associate at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
Professor John Walsh
John Walsh is a Professor of Structural Geology at UCD School of Geological Sciences. Founding member and co-Director of the Fault Analysis Group, an externally funded research group of 6 post-doctoral fellows and 7 PhD students, founded in 1985 within University of Liverpool and relocating to University College Dublin in 2000. The group conducts basic research on all aspects of faults and fractures, and applies those research results to practical problems within the petroleum, mineral and coal industries. They have developed a broad range of fault-related analytical and modelling tools which have been adopted by industry: details of the group’s research publications and projects are available at www.fault-analysis-group.ucd.ie.
John has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in international journals or special publications. He has been Distinguished Lecturer for AAPG (American Association of Petroleum Geologists, 2007), EAGE (European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers, 2004) and PESA (Petroleum Exploration Society of Australia, 1993). The Fault Analysis Group was the recipient of the NovaUCD 2010 Innovation Award.
Dr Andy Wheeler
Dr Andrew Wheeler is a Senior Lecturer and Vice-Head of the School of Biological, Earth & Environmental Sciences in University College Cork. He is also Deputy Coordinator of Marine & Freshwater Research in the Environmental Research Institute.
His research interests are in marine geology especially the geology of cold-water corals and reefs, seabed mapping and benthic boundary layer processes. This encompasses both geophysics, sedimentology and biogeological processes. His work has been of practical benefit for habitat mapping/management and offshore renewable energy infrastructure development. His main study areas include the NE Atlantic and Irish Sea although he has also working in offshore northern Norway, Mauritania, Tonga and New Zealand.
Dr. Andrew Wheeler has published oer 40 peer-reviewed publication including a paper in Science (over 141 citations). He has also authoring two books on cold-water corals and the Irish deep-water seafloor. He has an active research group bring national and international funding and currently coordinates an ESF-funded international programme on deep-sea drilling.
http://www.ucc.ie/en/geology/Staff/AcademicStaff/DrAndyWheeler/
Mr Mike Young
Mike Young is Director of the Geological Survey of Northern Ireland, an office of the Northern Ireland Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment that is managed and staffed by the British Geological Survey. He is a graduate of Bristol University (physics), Imperial College (geophysics) and Warwick University (MBA). Mike joined GSNI in 2004 to manage the award-winning Tellus Project, which mapped Northern Ireland with detailed geochemical and airborne geophysical surveys. In 2009 he initiated a cross-border partnership of government and universities that is currently extending the Tellus surveys into the Republic of Ireland, with financing from ERDF. Before joining GSNI Mike spent more than 20 years abroad, working in the mining and groundwater sectors, in industry and government , and has managed regional geophysical mapping projects in many countries of Africa and West Asia. From 1979-91 he was Chief Geophysicist of Robertson Research International. He has published on mining and groundwater exploration in arid environments, regional geophysical mapping, institutional development in the water sector, and on the results of the Tellus surveys. Mike is a Fellow of the Geological Society of London and President-elect of the Belfast Geologists’ Society.