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FELS Inaugural Lecture with Professor Jo Nield and Professor Ivo Tews Event

Time:

3:30pm

Date:

2025-04-10 15:30:00

Venue:

ºÚÁÏÉç, Centenary Building (100), University Road, Southampton, SO17 1BJ

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Event details

This was our first Faculty of Environmental and Life Sciences Inaugural Lecture in a series that celebrates the careers of our new Professors. At our first event on Thursday 10th April 2025, Professor Joanna Nield from the School of Geography and Environmental Science and Professor Ivo Tews from the School of Biological Sciences presented their research.

Watch the lecture videos

Professor Jo Nield - TLS: Telling Landscape Stories (or playing with laser patterns in deserts)

Professor Ivo Tews - Protein crystallography, a journey into time and space

Keynote Speakers

Professor Jo Nield

TLS: Telling Landscape Stories (or playing with laser patterns in deserts)

Desert landscapes contain intricate and beautiful patterns, from dune fields ubiquitous with desert environments where dunes can be 100 metres tall and stretch for hundreds of kilometres to metre scale polygonal salt ridges on the surfaces of dry lakes. While some larger patterns are easier to study because they change more slowly, dunes and salt crusts may change their shape or location by several centimetres or more in just a few hours.

In her inaugural lecture, Jo will outline how her innovative terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) methods have captured some of the dynamics of different desert patterns and then delve deeper into the feedbacks between surfaces and wind-blown sand transport that help to initiate and grow bedforms that may or may not develop into dunes. While TLS can aid in our search to answer some fundamental aeolian science questions, future innovations in technology are required to fully understand iconic desert landscapes.

Biography

Professor Jo Nield is an Aeolian Geomorphologist who has pioneered the use of terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) to understand dynamic processes in aeolian environments (both dune fields and dusty landscapes), recognised by the Royal Geographical Society's Gill Memorial Award in 2016 for 'outstanding early career research in aeolian processes and arid landform development'.

In 2007 she moved to Southampton to start a Lectureship and continued her interests in aeolian landscapes initially via modelling and later with fieldwork. She has been leading the second year BSc field course to Tenerife for over a decade which won the Most Innovative and Creative Virtual Learning Environment Award in 2022 when the field course switched to an online Namibia version during the pandemic.

She is currently President Elect for the International Society for Aeolian Research, having served on several British Society for Geomorphology committees, as a science officer for the EGU Geomorphology Division and also as an Associate Editor for three international journals.

Professor Ivo Tews

Protein crystallography, a journey into time and space

Structural Biology is a technique that allows us to understand how biomolecules perform essential functions in life from the translation of genes into proteins to the inner workings of the immune system. These processes often involve intricate molecular machines with several individual components. Ivo’s work uses X-ray based techniques to visualise the involved biomolecules and their interaction. The work uses X-ray scattering approaches of biomolecules in solution to understand how biomolecules move as well as crystals made from proteins to understand their atomic structure.

Ivo’s talk illustrates fundamental processes, such as the acquisition of nutrients by marine bacteria, the synthesis of vitamins by plants or the use of antibodies as cancer medication. Ivo’s work describes the dynamics of the molecular structures over time to understand how biomolecules work.

Biography

Ivo Tews is Professor in Structural Biology and actively involved in methods development for macro-molecular crystallography, working together with the Diamond Light Source (Harwell), the UK-XFEL hub, and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in France.

He presently chairs the Collaborative Computing Project No. 4 (CCP4) in software development with more than 20,000 academic and over 160 industrial licensees worldwide.

At Southampton, he built the facility for Macromolecular Crystallisation in Biology, and works together with colleagues in the National Biofilms Innovation Centre, in Oceanography, the National Crystallography Service in Chemistry, and with Medicine, with particularly strong links to the Centre for Cancer Immunology.