Organisation
Professional experience
Offshore Marine Scientist with Egagasini Marine Node, South African Environmental Observation Network, Cape Town, South Africa.
2010 – Current. Responsibilities include establish and lead SAEON’s Offshore Marine Biodiversity research, establishing a research team (staff, post-doc & post-grad), attract and manage funding for research, develop science plan and research strategy, establish industry and government collaborations to further research objectives, establish national and international collaborations education
outreach mentorship, science communication, data management, reporting to NRF and DST.
South African Lead scientist of a research expedition to survey two Indian Ocean seamounts in collaboration with OceanX and OceanQuest leading a diverse team from Africa representing 5 African countries, Portugal, Brazil and Saudi Arabia.
Lead of the SeaMap project, a large foundational biodiversity information project funded by the National Research Foundation that collated more than 50 000 South African marine invertebrate occurrence records to serve in an open access repository, and enabled 1250 marine invertebrates to be sequenced.
Lead the Benthic Trawl Experiment examining changes in benthic communities in areas where trawl fishing ceased compared to areas where fishing continued between 300-500 m on the western shelf edge of South Africa.
Project coordinator for the offshore benthic biodiversity assessment on the Agulhas Bank, considering the potential role of petroleum infrastructure – 2008-2010
Senior Consultant, Anchor Environmental Consultants CC, Cape Town fulfilling various project co-ordination, management and leadership responsibilities2002–2006.
