About

I'm Robyn, a PhD student at the University of Warwick. I'm currently just finishing up my PhD research, and will defend my thesis in September 2019 before moving to Canada for a six month position at Dalhousie University later on this year. Previously, I did a Marine Biology degree at Plymouth University between 2010 and 2013. If you'd like to take a look at my CV and what I've worked on previously etc., then please click here.

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I'm really passionate about anthropogenic impacts on the environment (particularly climate change and plastic pollution), and also am really interested in microbial ecology. In my spare time, I love travelling, photography, being in or around some form of water or outdoors and also science outreach activities.

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My PhD is titled "Food or just a free ride? Exploring marine microbial community dynamics on natural and synthetic particles" and has been looking at the degradation of plastics by marine microbes, as well as what we might be able to learn about the degradation of plastic pollution by what we already know about microbial communities and their degradation of natural compounds. The position that I'll be taking up at Dalhousie University later this year is a six month ACU Blue Charter Fellowship and will look at the Plastisphere - the microbial community that is colonising plastics around the world, hopefully identifying the factors that shape these communities. After this, I'm hoping to be able to stay in Canada for at least another 18 months or so, and will be looking for another Postdoctoral Research role, hopefully in Microbial Ecology.

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I've been using this site to post a few blogs (somewhat infrequently), mainly focused on making my research accessible for my family and friends, and of course anyone else that is interested! I'm also planning to try and write something on what I wish there had been more info on when I was starting my PhD (and before), and maybe on some lab methods that it would have been nice to have more information on, too. I'm aiming to generally keep this to a level that anyone without a science degree can understand, but if I do end up posting some lab methods then I guess that this won't be the case for that. I hope I can manage to make this interesting, but would love to hear any feedback on what I'm doing well, could do better, or ideas on what could go here :)


(Picture: Milford Sound, New Zealand. Taken by me).