Phil Wookey joins the department

Phil Wookey joins the department as Professor of Physical Geography from 1 August. He comes to Sheffield from the University of Stirling, where he was Professor of Ecosystems Ecology.

Phil is an ecosystems ecologist/biogeochemist, whose principal research focus is on high latitude ecosystems and environmental change. He’s worked in the Arctic/sub-Arctic (Fennoscandian mountains, Svalbard, northern Iceland and the North Slope of Alaska) since 1993, and was based at Uppsala University, in Sweden, for over seven years. He is passionate about 'The North', and attributes his love of cold, snowy and windswept places to his maternal heritage (from Sutherland, in the north of Scotland), going on expedition to North Iceland as an undergrad, reading Jack London novels, and possibly also to the lyrics of a Led Zeppelin song!

At core, Phil is a process ecologist/biogeochemist, but is particularly keen to see process studies placed into earth system context. Research highlights have been the publication of three International Tundra Experiment (ITEX) meta-analysis papers (in Ecological Monographs, PNAS and Ecology Letters), each of which had a major impact on the scientific community.

In 2012 Phil and colleagues' work for the International Polar Year ‘ABACUS’ project was published in Nature Climate Change. This research hints at some looming and unwelcome ‘surprises’ in the global greenhouse, and challenges the validity of some of the basic logic underpinning key models of the global carbon cycle and climate system.