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FELS Inaugural Lecture with Professor Jo Nield Event

Time:

3:30pm

Date:

2025-04-10 15:30:00

Venue:

University of Southampton, Centenary Building (100), University Road, Southampton, SO17 1BJ

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Event details

This was our first Faculty of Environmental and Life Sciences Inaugural Lecture in a series that celebrates the careers of our newly appointed Professors. At our first event on Thursday 10th April 2025, Professor Joanna Nield from the School of Geography and Environmental Science and Professor Ivo Tews from the School of Biological Sciences presented their research.

Watch the lecture video

Professor Jo Nield - TLS: Telling Landscape Stories (or playing with laser patterns in deserts)

See Professor Ivo Tews' lecture here

Watch all the Inaugural Lecture videos from 2025

Professor Jo Nield

TLS: Telling Landscape Stories (or playing with laser patterns in deserts)

Desert landscapes contain intricate and beautiful patterns, from dune fields ubiquitous with desert environments where dunes can be 100 metres tall and stretch for hundreds of kilometres to metre scale polygonal salt ridges on the surfaces of dry lakes. While some larger patterns are easier to study because they change more slowly, dunes and salt crusts may change their shape or location by several centimetres or more in just a few hours.

In her inaugural lecture, Jo will outline how her innovative terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) methods have captured some of the dynamics of different desert patterns and then delve deeper into the feedbacks between surfaces and wind-blown sand transport that help to initiate and grow bedforms that may or may not develop into dunes. While TLS can aid in our search to answer some fundamental aeolian science questions, future innovations in technology are required to fully understand iconic desert landscapes.

Biography

Professor Jo Nield is an Aeolian Geomorphologist who has pioneered the use of terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) to understand dynamic processes in aeolian environments (both dune fields and dusty landscapes), recognised by the Royal Geographical Society's Gill Memorial Award in 2016 for 'outstanding early career research in aeolian processes and arid landform development'.

In 2007 she moved to Southampton to start a Lectureship and continued her interests in aeolian landscapes initially via modelling and later with fieldwork. She has been leading the second year BSc field course to Tenerife for over a decade which won the Most Innovative and Creative Virtual Learning Environment Award in 2022 when the field course switched to an online Namibia version during the pandemic.

She is currently President Elect for the International Society for Aeolian Research, having served on several British Society for Geomorphology committees, as a science officer for the EGU Geomorphology Division and also as an Associate Editor for three international journals.