Healthcare and Science thomsonreuters.com

I specialize in long-term climate change cycles and their effect on human migration, specifically looking at the Middle East.

My research is based around the patterns of change over the last two million years and how that has affected North Africa and Arabia, changing it from very wet environment to the arid landscape we know today.

To discover and produce an accurate timescale I focus on dating the landscapes, looking for changes between aridity and wetness and trying to reconstruct what the climate was like.

The vast tracts of geological time act like a pump. When the pump is on, the tropics migrate north and the monsoons associated with Africa and the Indian Ocean migrate the same way into Arabia.

Once landscape becomes verdant, fertile and able to sustain life — humans naturally follow. When populations start to move we can trace their journeys over thousands of years until we reach where we are today.

My focus is the route they took. Did they go north? Did they cross the Sahara: the Red Sea and into the Levant, then Israel and into Europe? Or did they go across the Red Sea and into Arabia, disperse across Arabia into Asia and then down through the Far East and into Australasia?

Although we are looking at the landscape today, it is my belief that this historical data will help evidence that global climate is not static and that large scale environmental changes have taken place and will again. I strongly believe we need to be better custodians of our planet but global climate change is not solely caused by humans and anthropogenic means. There are long-term natural cycles that tell us the Earth's climate is dynamic. As such it is extremely complex, and unfortunately many of the models that people use to project the future can't take into account all of the variables. I want to use an insight into what has happened in the past to inform us about how we can prepare for the future.

The key product I use is Web of Knowledge. This is a very good way to track publications and analyze what is being cited regularly and all this is having a deep impact on my particular subject area.