Professor Jonathan Holmes

Jonathan was educated at Honley High School, West Yorkshire, and Hertford College, Oxford. From 1988 to 2000 he was Lecturer/Senior Lecturer and then Reader in Geography at Kingston University. He came to UCL as research director of the Environmental Change Research Centre (ECRC) and Reader in Environmental Change in 2000. He is currently Professor of Physical Geography and director of ECRC.

My research is concerned with the reconstruction and understanding of late Pleistocene and Holocene environments, human–climate interactions and data–model comparisons. It  falls into three major themes;

1. Climate variability in low-latitude regions (Northern Neotropics, North and West Africa, Western China and Central Asia)
2. Rapid climate change events across Europe
3. Methodological developments in the application of carbonate nonmarine microfossils and microfossil geochemistry to palaeoclimate reconstruction.

Recent Funding

2022-2023 UCL-IIT Delhi partnership fund ‘Exploring the spatiotemporal patterns of water stable-isotope across Indo-Gangetic plains to understand the regional hydroclimate

2013-2015 NERC standard grant (NE/K00610X/1) Climate variability over the circum-Caribbean region during the past 1200 years from oxygen-isotope analyses of lake sediments

2012-2014 Royal Society Partnership Grant Detecting Change in Local Ponds

Outreach activities with schools, colleges and the public
I regularly take part in various outreach activities with school groups from upper-level primary to 6^th form. I was organizer of a Southwark Schools ‘Gifted and Talented’ event on environmental microscopy and organizer of, and participant in, OPAL (OPen Air Laboratories)-based aquatic ecology fieldwork with 90 Year 6 children. I regularly give lectures on climate change to various local 6^th forms. I have worked with the wider public in the London Science Museum’s ‘Antenna Live’ gallery public engagement event on Sensing the Oceans and its  'Lates' Event on Climate Change

Royal Society Partnership Grant
Detecting changes in local ponds was an exciting project at a junior school in Surrey in which I was the university partner. The project, which ran from 2012 to 2014, was funded by a partnership grant from the Royal Society and designed to give school children the opportunity to take part in a genuine scientific research project. The grant has provided money for lab and field equipment in the school.

Media
I contributed to the BBC World Service Science in Action programme in connection with the drying of the Sahara (May 2008). This work, which was a ‘Perspective’ piece that I wrote for Science, also attracted media attention from the New York Times and various popular science publications. I was interviewed for BBC Breakfast TV in connection with IPCC 4^th assessment (2007), BBC Lunchtime news (2007) in connection with the finding that 2006 was the hottest year for Britain on record and on  the European heatwave (2017). I acted as consultant for BBC Science and History Programme ‘Superstorm’ and shot video footage in Western China’s drylands in 2006.

Policy
I managed the production of, and contributed to, Water Resources and Sustainable Development in North West China: a case Study of the Minqin Basin a bilingual (English – Mandarin) information brochure for water managers and local government officials in Gansu Province, P. R. China, published in 2002 and was invited participant in UK-Nigeria Bilateral Forum on environmental change, hosted in London in 2000 by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and attended by a small group of British and Nigerian government ministers, NGO representatives and academics.

My primary teaching role is in past climatic and environmental change, which I teach at both undergraduate and postgraduate level

Year 3

GEOG0052 Climate Change: Past, present, future (co-convenor)

Year 2

GEOG0016 The Practice of Geography (contributor)

GEOG0021 Reconstructing Past Environments (contributor)

Year 1

GEOG0008 Environmental Change (convenor)

GEOG0014 Geography in the Field 2  (co-convenor)

Postgraduate teaching

GEOG0120 Past climates (contributor)

GEOG0123 Climate proxies (convenor)

GEOG0123 Biological Indicators of Environmental Change (contributor)

Joanna Tindall - Lacustrine carbonate oxygen-isotopes as tracers of past climate change in NW Europe (NERC London DTP studentship, co-supervising with Prof Ian Candy, RHUL)

Committees

UCL
Director of the Environmental Change Research Centre
Academic Director, Bloomsbury Environmental Isotope Facility (BEIF)
Secretary, Departmental Laboratory Users' Group

External
Member, NERC Peer-review College