Team

The Team

Veerle Huvenne
Veerle is a marine geoscientist at the National Oceanography Centre, and Team Leader of the Seafloor & Habitat Mapping team. She is the Principal Scientist of the CODEMAP project, and acts as chief scientist during the cruise.

Leigh Marsh
Leigh is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, based at the NOC. She is interested in the distribution and abundance of deep-sea organisms, and the use of deep-submergence technologies such as ROV’s and AUV’s to examine the relationship between these animals and the environment.

Russell Wynn
Russell Wynn is Research Scientist at NOC, and will be leading the work on Haig Fras and the Canyons Marine Conservation Zone

Claudio Lo lacono
Claudio is Research Scientist at NOC, specialised in benthic mapping, acoustic seafloor characterisation and submarine canyon research

Katleen Robert
Katleen is postdoc within CODEMAP

Tim Le Bas
Tim is researcher at NOC, and our wizard in acoustic mapping!

Paul Tyler
Paul Tyler is Professor in Marine Biology at the University of Southampton, and has years and years of experience in deep-sea research.

Jenny Gales
Jenny is a post-doc at NOC, working on sediment transport in submarine canyons. She is particularly interested in the ROV vibrocorer trials at the end of the cruise.

Noelie Benoist
After my Masters at NOCs, I’ve been working in the DeepSeas department on a project involving image analysis of the benthic system at the Haig Fras rMCZ. During the JC124-125-126 cruise, I will aid in the acquisition of photographs using the AUV and ROV, for assessing the substratum type and benthic fauna.

Paul Shawyer
I’m a MSci Geology student at Southampton University with my 4th year project based on sediment flows in the Whittard Canyon. This is my first research cruise and I will be assisting other members of the team whilst gaining as much experience as possible.

Raissa Hogan
PhD student at National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG). She is interested in evolution of deep-sea corals and her project is focusing on Pennatulacea and Antipatharia. The core of her project is studying the phylogeography of these groups, and initially she is assessing their diversity in the Northeast Atlantic.

Inge van den Beld
Inge is a PhD student at IFREMER (Brest, France). She studies cold-water coral (CWC) habitats in (French) submarine canyons south of Whittard Canyon. She is looking at the distribution of these CWC habitats and the composition of their associated fauna using image footage acquired by an ROV and a towed camera. She joins JC125 to see how similar Whittard Canyon may be from the other canyons of the Bay of Biscay, especially those next to it.

Laura Peteiro
Laura is a post-doc working in parallel at University of Aveiro, Portugal and University of Vigo, Spain. She joins JC125 to carry out specific experiments using the ROV, to learn more about population connectivity of Acesta clams between deep-sea canyons

Alex Callaway
Alex works for Cefas as a seabed mapper, creating maps and reports for marine protected areas. Alex has a particular interest in the techniques we are planning to use to investigate the Haig Fras MPAs and The Canyons Marine Conservation Zone.

Tahmeena Aslam
Tahmeena is a PhD student at the University of East Anglia and CEFAS. She will be looking after the seaglider and hunting for internal waves.

Gareth Carter
Gareth is a marine geoscientist with the British Geological Survey, focusing predominantly on marine geohazards. He is interested in the role that submarine slope mass-wasting has to play in sediment transport within the Whittard Canyon system. This will be his first expedition at sea!

Rob Hall
Rob is a lecturer in shelf sea oceanography at UEA with a specific interest in internal waves and their interactions with complex topography. He will be piloting the seaglider from dry land during the cruise.