The Record 2009 - Keble College - University of Oxford

The College at Large
To get to this recent career highlight I started off with a longstanding
interest in weather and climate and a physics degree
from Oxford. Not knowing anything much about the particular
topic I wanted to study, I began a Ph.D. in what I thought
would be dynamical meteorology (i.e. weather) at Imperial
College with an advisor who had interests in both ocean and
atmosphere. Playing around with different applications of a
simple vortex model I hit upon an ocean dynamics application
which seemed most likely to lead to a thesis, and hence became
an accidental physical oceanographer. After this accidental
beginning, I made a conscious decision to stick with it, because
physical oceanography is such a young field (compared to
meteorology, its atmospheric counterpart) that there are still
plenty of relatively fundamental problems to solve. As someone
who touched a computer only once during my entire time at
Oxford, it is perhaps surprising that I’ve ended up specializing
in computer simulations, but fortunately I’ve had plenty of
patient teachers over the years. I carry out virtual laboratory
experiments, using the computer code as my lab. Understanding
the simulations is aided by plenty of theoretical analysis (i.e.
old fashioned equation solving) and observations made by
colleagues provide a continual stimulus for new problems to
examine. I did go to sea once, on an 18-day research cruise from
Barbados to French Guyana (sounds idyllic doesn’t it?) but I
discovered it’s definitely not where my strengths are (hard to
think intelligently when you feel sick).
From Imperial College I moved first to MIT, and became
an accidental immigrant to the US, bringing only 1 suitcase
thinking I was only staying a year. 18 years later, I’ve lived in
Colorado (a strange place to be an oceanographer, but they
have a big climate lab there), Los Angeles, Cape Cod, and
since 2004, in Princeton. I am a research oceanographer at
the University, on the faculty of the graduate programme in
Atmosphere and Ocean Sciences and also work closely with the
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, a government climate
modelling lab. In the middle of all this, I married (another
oceanographer) and we’ve had to deal with the usual ‘two-body
problem’ of finding two jobs in reasonable proximity. For many
years we worked 90 miles apart, living in the middle, but with
the arrival of our two children that became unsustainable. So
when we were approached about two jobs at the same lab in
Princeton, we upped and moved once more. It also helped that
the new jobs were as good as or better than the ones we were
leaving behind, for both of us. Living only 10 minutes from
work makes a huge difference, not just to our personal lives
but also to our careers — it’s now much easier for one of us to
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