Challenger Society celebrates the 150th Anniversary of Challenger Expedition

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This year the biannual Challenger Society Conference marked the 150th anniversary of the Challenger expedition and celebrates the birth of international and interdisciplinary oceanography with the meeting held at the Natural History Museum in London.

The conference brought together over 400 scientists to take stock of where marine science has arrived at in UK, as well as providing the opportunity to consider the future of open, international, collaborative, inclusive and diverse marine science

Congratulations to Bangor University Physical Oceanography PhD student Katie Sieradzen on winning the Challenger Society Cath Allen Prize at conference. Katie’s poster described her ENVISION PhD research into the impact of tidal mixing on shelf sea flushing times in a global climate model.

Katie’s poster was selected for the prize from over 100 posters at the conference. The Prize is named in honour of Bangor alumni Cath Allen, who studied for a PhD on shelf sea fronts with Prof John Simpson in the 1980s before passing at a tragically young age in 1991. Cath came to Bangor to study for her PhD having undertaken a BSc and MSc at Liverpool University. Following completion of her PhD she took up an academic position at Lancaster University.

Amongst the keynote speakers at the conference were Professor Gary Carvalho, Emeritus Professor of Molecular Ecology here at Bangor University, where his research has focused on employing genetic markers to address major questions in ecology and evolution.

The Challenger Society and Bangor University

The biannual Challenger Society conference series started in Bangor in 1984. The first conference was held at the School of Ocean Sciences in the (now demolished) Westbury Mount Lecture room, abit a squeeze for the 120 delegates! It was organised by John Simpson, along with Steve Thorpe (then at Southampton), Paul Linden (Cambridge) and Roy Chester (Liverpool) with important jobs like operating the slide projector (this was before overheads!) taken on by Bangor PhD students including Ed Hill (now head of the National Oceanography Centre and Bill Turrell (now head of Environment Monitoring and Assessment Programme with Marine Scotland Science).

Other Bangor participants included PhD student Meg O’Hara who made the most of the location of the conference in the Natural History Museum to check out some of the exhibits!