President
Yves Candela is Curator of Invertebrate Palaeobiology at the National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh. He graduated from the Université de Bretagne Occidentale, in Brest and then completed a PhD at the National University of Ireland Galway on Ordovician brachiopods from County Tyrone. His research focuses on Early Palaeozoic brachiopods, especially from the Ordovician Period, examining their taxonomy, systematics,
Secretary
Elsa is a Scottish palaeontologist who workds extensively on the Isle of Skye. She is a NERC Independent Research Fellow at National Museums Scotland. She uses X-ray tomography and digital visualisation to understand the anatomy and growth of the first mammals and their closest relatives. This work helps us understand the assembly of mammal traits, and how they have contributed to the group’s ongoing evolutionary success.
Vice President
Vice President
Tim McCormick is a geoscience data specialist at the British Geological Survey. His work focuses on developing systematic and stratigraphic data, geoscience ontologies and vocabularies, and ‘FAIR’ (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) data. He teaches databases and data management in the UK and abroad.
Tim gained a PhD from the University of Glasgow in 1995 studying trilobite evolution. He worked as a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Birmingham, The Natural History Museum, London, and the University of Glasgow before joining BGS in 2000.
Treasurer
Manabu is a lecturer in zoology at the University of Reading. His research focuses on the evolution of vertebrate form and function, by integrating morphometrics and biomechanics in a Bayesian phylogenetic comparative framework. His longstanding passion is for the biting and cutting mechanics of theropod tooth rows, and he has recently developed an experimental biomechanics platform, the DinoSAW system, to record the physical forces of cutting. Manabu previously worked as a data scientist analysing market research data and has professional-grade R programming skills, which he uses to analyse palaeontological big data.
Editor
Dr Sue Beardmore is a specialist in skeletal preservation of vertebrate fossils. Her PhD research at University College, Dublin, was on Marine reptiles from Monte San Giorgio and the Posidonia Shale, and pterosaurs from Germany. She was the John Ellerman Project Curator at National Museums Scotland, investigating fossil and natural science collections in Scottish museums. Her previous roles include developing the Recognised Collection of fossils at Elgin Museum, Moray, and projects at Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Sue has been a palaeontology volunteer (field work) for the Natural History Museum of Utah since 2003.
Editor
Lucy is a Senior Curator of Palaeontology at Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales. Much of her research involves the taxonomy of Ordovician trilobites, and using trilobite fossils for biostratigraphy and palaeobiogeography, which has entailed working on faunas from Greenland, Canada, Kazakhstan and south Wales. Other research publications have focused on other groups of arthropods (insects, lobsters), problematic fossils (machaeridia), and the taphonomy of exceptionally preserved fossils, which was the subject of Lucy’s PhD at the University of Bristol. Another key interest is outreach, including work on temporary museum exhibitions, and helping to organize and facilitate public events.
Editor
Web Officer
Ben did his postdoctoral research at the University of Bristol, focusing on the evolution of marine reptiles through the Mesozoic. He combines taxonomy, phylogenetics, CT scanning and big data to explore changes in body plan and ecology with increasing interest in how different organisms take advantage of evolutionary opportunity.
Communications Officer
Amber is a PhD student at the University of Liverpool, funded by the UKRI NERC ACCE doctoral training programme. Her current work looks at the evolution of unique traits in the crania of the leporid lagomorphs (rabbits and hares). Primarily, she uses CT imaging and 3D modelling to test hypotheses of function via an engineering technique called finite element analysis.
More generally, Amber is interested in how biomechanical factors drive cranial evolution across all mammals including more recent human ancestors. In addition, she has a keen personal interest in the history of science, in particular that of palaeontology, evolutionary anthropology and archaeology.
Marc is the curator of fossil reptiles and amphibians at the Natural History Museum London. He also has honorary positions at University College London and the University of Adelaide Australia. His research frequently involves using X-ray CT data to quantify and communicate anatomical data to answer questions related to the function and diversity of amphibians and reptiles (in particular frogs, salamanders, and rhynchocephalians).
Mike Howe has led the teams curating the BGS collections for over twenty years and is responsible for pulling the disparate collections in Keyworth, Edinburgh, Wallingford, Exeter and London into a single coherent resource with online digital
access. He has pioneered collections digitisation with the GB3D Type Fossils online project, which includes thousands of 3d digital scans and represented a significant innovation. With a PhD from Cambridge on Silurian graptolites, the dearth of academic posts in the early 1980s prompted an advantageous interregnum in business management before joining BGS as their first Chief Curator.
