Mike joined the Department of Earth Sciences in 2019 and holds the Chair in Geophysics at the University of Oxford. He became Head of the Department of Earth Sciences in March 2022.
Mike's research interests cover pure and applied seismology across a range of scales. He is a seismologist whose work has taken him to the hottest and coldest places on Earth, conducting experiments in places like Ethiopia and the Antarctic. He has studied the Earth from its core to its surface, including work on plate tectonics, volcanoes and ice sheets. He has led seismic field experiments in a range of settings, including the installation of ocean-bottom seismometers to monitor the mid-Atlantic Ridge, and the use of fibre-optic arrays to monitor ice-quakes in Antarctica. He is also interested in the role of Geophysics in the world’s energy demands. Mike founded the BUMPS research consortium, and has a strong track record in the seismic monitoring of CCS sites. Mike was previously the BGS Professor of Geophysics at the University of Bristol. He has a PhD from Queen’s University in Canada and was postdoctoral researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the USA. He has held faculty positions at the University of Toronto and the University of Leeds, and was previously president of the British Geophysical Association and vice-president (Geophysics) of the Royal Astronomical Society. In 2011 he was elected fellow of the American Geophysical Union, he became a fellow of the Royal Society in 2019 and in 2022 he was elected fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
