The interdisciplinary approach at Queen’s University Belfast has helped it attract some of the finest minds to fight critical climate and environmental threats.
Take Prof Maarten Blaauw. He fell into palaeoecology, the ecology of subfossil animals and plants, almost by accident. As a boy, he wanted to be an ice-cream seller but just one afternoon in the job convinced him it was not for him. Then he thought of becoming a doctor, but realised blood made him faint, so he set aside that ambition too.
He studied biology, took a job in palaeoecology, and joined Queen’s University Belfast 18 years ago. He’s now a globally respected expert, professor at the School of Natural and Built Environment and director of the 14CHRONO Centre for Climate, the Environment and Chronology. “It’s a really, really nice job,” he says. “It’s very diverse – there’s archaeology, there’s Earth sciences, there’s forensics, carbon burial and carbon sequestration.”
Some of Blaauw’s most influential work is with peat bogs. “They’re fascinating systems because there’s hardly any decomposition,” he says. “So you can just take a core, which lets you go down in time for several millennia, 8,000 years or so, sometimes 13,000 years.”
He describes his exploration of peat bogs with infectious enthusiasm. “You get all wet and dirty and it’s muddy, but it’s full of insects, birds, spiders – occasionally angry farmers as well,” he says.
Last month he was doing fieldwork in a Danish bog where multiple human bodies were found in the 1940s. He wasn’t there to find more bodies, but to reconstruct what the environment and local conditions looked like when those bodies were deposited.
Blaauw’s work has enjoyed universal impact – quite literally. Some of the software he developed as part of his research practice has been used on Mars to analyse a sediment system on the red planet. One of his programs is stored at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a secure backup facility for the world’s crop diversity. “So if something happens and the internet does indeed crash or something, then the software code is still available there,” he says.
He says life is “very, very multidisciplinary” at Queen’s, which is important because “archaeology by its very nature borrows from many, many different disciplines”. As he works, he can call on colleagues with expertise in politics, as well as historians, physicists, chemists, biologists and human geographers.
Working together, they are able to extend their influence. “Northern Ireland is a pretty small place, so there’s not that much distance between us in the universities and the politicians,” he says. “And it’s not that difficult to actually get to speak to someone who has some degree of influence.”
Blaauw has also had a hand in the production of the IntCal calibration curves, which are used to correct radiocarbon ages for changes over time so that chronologies are comparable worldwide. Created in Belfast, they’ve been used all over the world. About 92% of the thousands of radiocarbon dates produced and used annually are calibrated with these IntCal curves.
Prof Jaimie Dick was also attracted by Queen’s worldwide reputation. Now he’s got one of his own. A global expert on invasive alien species both locally and worldwide, next year he’s off to New Zealand to advise on how to deal with the Asian clam, which has invaded the country’s rivers. He’s also advised South Africa on how to deal with a variety of invaders, such as the Largemouth bass.
“The Largemouth bass was introduced to the Sundays River System in South Africa and has been considered invasive,” says Dick. “There are huge political, social and legal debates that are ongoing in the area to discuss how best to deal with this invasive species.”
He adds: “A lot of the papers that we’ve published have been picked up across the world and our methods have been emulated and copied. We’ve become a centre of excellence for dealing with invasive species globally, not just at the local level.”
He too enjoys the “interdisciplinary” nature of Queen’s where he’s “brushing shoulders with an engineer one minute and a food chemist the next”. He compares this diversity to evolution itself. “Natural selection works on variation, leading to adaptation, so if you allow variation, you allow adaptation,” he says. “That diversity is absolutely key and Queen’s has been good at it.”
“Too many academics go down rabbit holes,” he says, “but when you’re seeing the issue from multiple directions and you can speak to someone on a subject that you know little about, you can start to see the bigger picture and that excites you.”
This brings an agility to the university’s team, he says, and his energy personifies this. “We’ve unified a subject area with a common method that nobody had picked up until we did that at Queen’s – and now it’s a global movement to use our methodology,” he says.
Dr Ross Cuthbert was once one of Dick’s students. He’s now a lecturer and an expert in a number of interlinked fields, particularly biological invasions, climate change and disease vector biology. The arrival of invasive species is like a lottery, he says, with some species succeeding and others failing following introduction through human trade and transport networks, noting the recent detection and rapid removal of Asian hornets in Northern Ireland.
“The issue matters because invasive species are one of the major drivers of biodiversity decline and they’ve caused or been linked in part to the majority of extinction events around the world,” he says. “The effects are quite substantial, both ecologically and economically, with their costs reaching trillions of pounds.”
“Queen’s really provides an ideal environment to work in those areas because you can bring together lots of different expertise and there are a lot of academics working in different spaces,” he says.
This strong interdisciplinary ethos is perfect for complex problems like invasive species, he says. “They have social aspects because they’re a human issue, they have environmental aspects because of their impacts, as well as health aspects and more.”
Research to Reality: a series of roundtables featuring academics from Queen’s University Belfast
Queen’s University Belfast ranks among the top 200 universities worldwide in both the QS and THE rankings
Discover how collaboration is driving cutting edge research with global impact at Queen’s University Belfast
