Visiting Scholars for 2010
ANNIMS will have two visiting scholars for 2010.
Professor David Prandle is UWA's visiting scholar for 2010 and Professor Tarmo Soomere is JCU's visiting scholar for 2010.
Professor David Prandle
Professor David Prandle is one of the leading coastal physical oceanographers in the world with a very wide experience in working in coastal systems including estuaries. He is a pioneer in the development of coastal observation systems and has published widely in a range of subjects including large inter-disciplinary projects.
David is currently Professor at the University of Wales’ School of Ocean Sciences, Bangor.
He graduated as a civil engineer from the University of Liverpool and studied the propagation of a tidal bore in the River Hooghly for his Ph.D. at the University of Manchester.
He worked for 5 years as a consultant to Canada’s National Research Council, modelling the St. Lawrence and Fraser rivers. He was then recruited to the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council’s Bidston Observatory (now Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory) to design the operational software for controlling the Thames Flood Barrier.
Over the subsequent 30 years, he carried out observational, modelling and theoretical studies of tide and storm propagation, tidal energy extraction, circulation and mixing, temperatures and water quality in shelf seas and their coastal margins, particularly around the British Isles.
He has published over 100 refereed Journal papers (many as first/single author), over 100 Conf. Papers, 6 Books, 4 Strategy Documents. His latest book has just been published by the University of Cambridge Press entitled: Estuaries: Dynamics, Mixing, Sedimentation and Morphology.
His wider experience in the coastal regions and estuaries (very low expertise in Australia) would be a great benefit to ANNiMS partners. In additional his experience in the analysis of coastal observations, particularly HF Radar would be of great benefit to the whole IMOS community but in particular for those at UWA (HF Radar systems deployed already) and JCU (host of the HF Radar facility).
Professor Tarmo Soomere
Tarmo Soomere (b. 1957) graduated in 1980 from Lomonossov Moscow State University as a mathematician and received a PhD in oceanology from the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, Moscow in 1984, and the degree of Doctor of Mathematics in 1992 from Tartu University, Estonia.
He has been Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in the Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, in 1994-1997, and Visby Fellow in the University of Uppsala, Sweden, in 2000-2001.
In Estonia, he was appointed as Vice-Director of the Marine Systems Institute at TUT in 2002-2004. He was elected as the first Professor of Coastal Engineering in Estonia in 2005 to begin the teaching of port and coastal engineering at TUT.
As researcher, he is the Leading Research Scientist and Head of the Wave Engineering Laboratory in the Institute of Cybernetics at TUT. His scientific interests have been mostly concentrated in general wave matters, with applications in Rossby wave, internal wave and surface wave theory and modeling, including wave-driven coastal processes and hazards.
In 1993 he received the Young Scientist Research Publication Award from the European Geophysical Society, in 2002 the Estonian State Research Award as a member of the research group. He was declared as the Estonian Person of the Year in 2005 by awarded annually by the daily newspaper Postimees for his contribution to the forecast of a devastating storm, received the Baltic Assembly Prize for science in 2007, was elected to the Estonian Academy of Sciences in the end of 2007 and to the Academia Europaea in 2009.
Currently, he is on the European Science Foundation Marine Board and on the Environmental Steering Panel of the European Academies Scientific Advisory Council.
He has published >80 peer-reviewed papers in international journals and collections, >100 conference papers and technical reports, and many dozens of popular papers (mostly in Estonian).