Profiles: marine

Renowned for her research in computational fluid dynamics - the modelling of fluids using algorithms and equations - it is in the very hands-on environment of the Marine Building that Deborah Greaves, Professor of Ocean Engineering, is spearheading the University’s work in marine renewable energy.

As Director of the COAST (Coastal, Ocean and Sediment Transport) Laboratory and the University’s academic lead in the realm of coastal and ocean engineering, Deborah not only played a founding role in laying down the specifications for the building’s cutting-edge wave tanks and flumes ahead of its 2012 opening, but has led and been actively involved with a number of major research projects and commercial tests that have quickly established the facility on the regional, national and international stage for marine energy R&D.

They’ve included the EPSRC-funded study to test new, flexible concepts in marine energy conversion and the pan-European €2 million SOWFIA, which examines how wave farms can operate within EU directives for environmental conservation.

It is profile-raising projects such as these that has led to Plymouth becoming a member of the SUPERGEN marine energy consortium, and hosting their first-ever annual assembly to take place outside of Scotland.

“Coastal engineering and marine renewable energy are trying to address some of our most pressing issues: climate change, rising sea levels, increasing storminess, and the security of our energy needs,” says Deborah. “So finding that balance between supporting the sector and protecting the environment is key.”

With Plymouth now awarded City Deal status by the government - effectively a mandate to forge ahead with marine renewables development and investment - Deborah is set to play a key role in that balancing act.

“I want to know how animals work where they live, not just in the laboratory,” says John Spicer, Plymouth’s world-renowned Professor of Marine Zoology. “And when things change in the ocean, what effect does that have on its inhabitants?”

These are some of the questions that have fascinated John since the day his four-year-old self looked down into a rock pool on the Isle of Cumbria in the Firth of Clyde and wondered how shrimps were able to crawl out of the water, and why they would want to!

These questions John would answer in his PhD years later, and the first of many he has applied himself to through laboratory research, field experiments, and crucially, field observations.

It’s an approach to ecophysiology (the study of how animals work where they live) that he relishes, a ‘detective game’ that unfolds in the interaction between the three approaches.

Internationally recognised for his work on ocean acidification - in particular his involvement with the government-funded consortium investigating its impacts - it’s his research on the threat to marine biodiversity posed by rising temperatures and falling oxygen levels that he considers most urgent.

The author of over 150 scientific papers, not to mention the key text on biodiversity, found in every school in the United States, John recently completed a defining analysis for the Journal of Experimental Biology, an exercise in deconstruction which saw him ripping into some of his own past work and methodology as a way of reconstructing a more realistic ecophysiology.

“Science is not just knowledge, it doesn’t exist in a book,” John says. “It is caught and not taught. It relies upon human activity, building models of nature, testing and refining them.”

From low oxygen affecting krill placed in specially made cages lowered into Swedish fjords, to examining how crabs, shrimps and snails make survival ‘decisions’ in CO2-rich waters, John is still building models - and passing on his passion to his apprentices.