Research Experience Placements

To achieve the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to <2 °C above the pre-industrial average, it is now clear that active removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) will also be needed in addition to rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.  

Enhanced weathering (EW) is a CO₂ removal strategy that accelerates the natural drawdown of atmospheric CO₂ via the application of finely ground silicate minerals to croplands. If EW can be applied to around half of all global cropland, modelling suggests it could remove 0.5–2 Gt CO₂ yr⁻¹—up to 12% of what’s needed to meet the Paris targets. However, there is an urgent need to test and validate model estimates through real-world experiments. 

This project will contribute to ongoing EW research at the University of Southampton by generating new experimental data to better understand the fate of weathering-derived cations (Ca²⁺, Mg²⁺, K⁺, Na⁺) in basalt-amended soils. The student will conduct a series of experiments to assess the retention capacity of soils for these cations. The results will support the interpretation of complementary cation breakthrough experiments and will help inform cation exchange modelling efforts, which underpin field-scale estimates of CO₂ removal efficiency. 

The student will be supervised by Prof. Rachael James, Isabelle Davis (PhD student), and Dr. Xi (Helen) Chen. They will work in the School of Ocean and Earth Science’s world-class Geochemistry laboratories and receive hands-on training in geochemistry techniques and instrument analysis. The student will use R for data processing, gaining valuable coding and data analysis skills.  

The student will become a member of the Geochemistry research group during the placement and participate in the group’s activities, including seminars given by external speakers. They will also be able to network with start-up companies working on scaling EW solutions. Analytical costs will be covered through existing grants. 

Essential Skills and Behaviours

• Interest in pursuing an environmental sciences career.
• Attendance at the Undergraduate Summer Research Internship professional development programme.
• The student should have a background in environmental science, geology, chemistry or a related field.
• They should be willing and able to work carefully in a laboratory environment and adhere to health and safety protocols.
• They should have experience of organising and interrogating data, for example using Excel or R.

Desirable Skills and Behaviours

• Reliable
• Organised
• Communicative

Internship Supervisor Details

Prof. Rachael James

Professor of Geochemistry

R.H.James@soton.ac.uk

School of Ocean and Earth Sciences

Faculty of Environmental and Life Science

Which campus will the intern be based at during the internship?

Waterfront Campus

This project will involve analyses of particulate trace metal bioavailability. Trace metals such as iron and manganese limit primary production in the Southern Ocean and hence impact on carbon and nutrient cycling at global scales. Primary production by photosynthetic marine plankton is a critical process as it fuels the Southern Ocean food chain and determines biological carbon uptake. The Southern Ocean is experiencing rapid warming and it is crucial to understand how Southern Ocean ecosystems respond to global change. The aim of this work is to investigate the role of particulate trace metals in supplying dissolved iron and manganese that can be used by marine plankton.  

Samples for this work were collected as part of NERC grant ‘A new perspective on ocean photosynthesis’. These samples will be analysed in trace metal clean laboratory at the National Oceanography Centre and will run on a High-Resolution Mass Spectrometer which are part of world leading Centre for Earth Research Analyses Southampton. All training will be provided to the student by Prof. Maeve Lohan. The funding for the analyses is in place.

This work is part of a large project and so the student will not only learn trace metal analyses but be part of a wider network and work alongside PhD students and Post Doctoral Researchers in the marine biogeochemistry group based at the School of Ocean and Earth Sciences based at the National Oceanography Centre. They will join in regular team meetings and be involved in planning the analyses, working up the data and be involved in scientific publications that arise from the work. This will enable the student to gain in-depth understanding of research, and these skills will be highly transferable to either academic or industry.  

Essential Skills and Behaviours

• Interest in pursuing an environmental sciences career
• Attendance at the Undergraduate Summer Research Internship professional development programme 
• The student should be completing an undergraduate degree in any of these subjects: oceanography, marine sciences, marine biology, earth science, geochemistry, environmental science.  
• A strong desire to learn new laboratory techniques and work with a group of PhD students and post-doctoral researcher.  

Desirable Skills and Behaviours

• Training in all techniques indicated above can be provided from basic to advanced level, so no specific skills required. Although experience of one or more proposed techniques desirable.
• Quantitative analyses of results from a student project would be desirable.  

Internship Supervisor Name

Professor Maeve Lohan

Professor of Marine Chemistry

M.Lohan@soton.ac.uk

School of Ocean and Earth Sciences

Faculty of Environmental and Life Sciences

Which campus will the intern be based at during the internship?

Waterfront Campus

This is a data analysis project suitable for students with maths or data analysis or computational skills. 

Phytoplankton in the ocean ‘eat’ sunlight to obtain their energy. As a result, they can only live in the upper parts of the ocean where sunlight penetrates. Where there’s no light there are no phytoplankton. But the topmost parts of the ocean are usually devoid of nutrients, which phytoplankton also need. Because of this dual limitation, dense communities of phytoplankton are often found at 100 to 200 m depth in subtropical oceans, on the brink of light starvation but taking advantage  of a trickle of nutrients from nutrient-rich waters below.  

But just how low light can they tolerate? This has been difficult to analyse in a rigorous way up to now because of the heterogeneity of data. Previously light data has been collected in an uncoordinated way, for instance with each different scientist measuring at different times of day and with different instruments. This project will take advantage of a new and emerging dataset from biogeochemical Argo floats (https://biogeochemical-argo.org/). This already contains thousands of vertical profiles of light intensity all collected at close to local noon and with similar instruments. The biogeochemical floats also measure phytoplankton concentration (via both pigment concentration and particle abundance) and so it is straightforward to determine the light intensities where these deep dense communities are found. 

This project will analyse the biogeochemical data in Matlab or Python, taking advantage of the large and uniform dataset to start characterising the minimum light levels phytoplankton which can grow at. These deep-living phytoplankton are one type of extremophile, living at an extreme of environmental conditions, light in this case. This work will help us understand the limits to life in the ocean in terms of light. 

Essential Skills and Behaviours

• Interest in pursuing an environmental sciences career
• Attendance at the Undergraduate Summer Research Internship professional development programme 
• This is a data analysis project suitable for students with maths or data analysis or computational skills. 

Desirable Skills and Behaviours

• Reliable
• Organised
• Communicative

Internship Supervisor Details

Prof. Toby Tyrrell

Professor of Earth System Science

Toby.Tyrrell@soton.ac.uk

School of Ocean and Earth Sciences

Faculty of Environmental and Life Sciences

Which campus will the intern be based at during the internship?

Waterfront Campus

The diamondback moth Plutella xylostella is an agricultural pest that annually causes billions of pounds in damage to brassica crops world wide. In prior studies we observed that both adult locomotor activity and caterpillar herbivory were reduced in the presence of white light. It is, however, an open question to what extent colour temperature and wave lengths of light influence this response. The student will, therefore, use LED lights with known spectra and apply either single wave length red or blue light or white light of different colour temperatures to study how adult activity (Trikinetics Locomotor Activity system) and caterpillar feeding (Zantiks MWP system) are impacted. Given the increased use of LED lighting in agriculture and horticulture the findings of this work could have important implications for integrated pest management beyond the basic biological insights obtained by this investigation. 

Dr Wijnen, whose heads the research efforts on Plutella xylostella at the University of Southampton, will be the lead supervisor, while PhD students Lena Smith (INSPIRE) and Shubhangi Mahajan (SoCoBio) will also contribute to day-to-day supervision. The work will take place in the invertebrate and plant culture facilities of the School of Biological Sciences in B85 and use equipment and resources of Dr Wijnen’s group and the Facility. 

Essential Skills and Behaviours

• Interest in pursuing an environmental sciences career 
• Attendance at the Undergraduate Summer Research Internship professional development programme
• Students need to be enrolled in a relevant undergraduate degree (in the areas of life sciences, physics, chemistry)

Desirable Skills and Behaviours

• Organised
• Reliable
• Communicative

Internship Supervisor Details

Dr. Herman Wijnen

Associate Professor

H.Wijnen@soton.ac.uk

Biological Sciences

Faculty of Environmental and Life Sciences

Which campus will the intern be based at during the internship?

Highfield Campus

Marwell Zoo has recently developed and opened a new crayfish breeding facility to re-introduce this species to Hampshire waterways and increase their number. This includes a novel water filtration system, providing a non-chemical process to enhance water quality. Using our expertise in water systems and the impact of biofilm formation, we intend to monitor and track the microbial community changes and development in this system using a combination of culture, microscopy and molecular techniques.  

Within Microbiology at the School of Biological Sciences, we are developing a programme of work around microbiology with Marwell, ranging from microbiome studies of specific species through to understanding their role in the environment. This project will work alongside a current PhD student and Masters students. The study will benefit from these ongoing studies with a combination of work based at the zoo and in our microbiology laboratory on the Highfield Campus. It would offer opportunities in environmental sampling, working in a containment level 2 microbiology laboratory and learning standard (culture-based) and advanced (microscopy and sequencing) techniques. The study is innovative, providing important information for Marwell on the efficacy of their system but also more broadly on the use of a sustainable water treatment approach which could be extended to other facilities. This will form the start of a longer term analysis and as such will provide important initial data. In addition to the laboratory skills mentioned above, the student will gain experience in presenting data and results to stakeholders, data analysis and report writing.

 
Essential Skills and Behaviours

• Interest in pursuing an environmental sciences career
• Attendance at the Undergraduate Summer Research Internship professional development programme 
• It will be essential for a successful applicant to be able to travel to Marwell independently.
• The student should have completed microbiology modules during their studies.  

Internship Supervisor Name

Dr Sandra Wilks

Associate Professor

S.A.Wilks@soton.ac.uk

Faculty of Environmental and Life Sciences

Biological Sciences

Which campus will the intern be based at during the internship?

Highfield Campus

The Spain floods of October/November 2024 have been among the most devastating observed flooding hazards in Europe recently, causing huge financial losses and killing over 200 people. To predict and mitigate the risks of future flooding events, the occurrence and intensity of past events needs to be properly understood. However, the specific size of the flooding in Spain in the past has not been revealed so far. 

This project will collect river flooding deposits (mud, sand, gravel, or boulders redeposited by river floodings) formed by the 2024 event in Valencia and measure the grain size distribution of the deposits using Malvern Mastersizer 3000 at the University of Southampton. The topography of the area will be measured using a drone and RTK. Simultaneously, a numerical simulation of river flooding and sediment transport by river flow using the Delft-3D model will be conducted. The simulations will be conducted using clusters in the University of Southampton (UoS IRIDIS suite). The accuracy of the model will be calibrated using the collected sand sediment data through the field survey. After the model validation, the inundation area of past river flooding over the last few thousand years will be estimated by investigating the size of river flooding, which can reproduce the distribution of river flooding deposits reported so far using the validated model. 

The selected candidate will proceed with this project at the University of Southampton with a lead supervisor but join the ongoing project with the National Oceanography Centre, and Institutes in Spain (Universidad de Cantabria, ANZI) and Japan (Shinshu University, Chuo University) as collaborative work. Through this project, the candidate can enhance the skill of numerical simulation of sediment transport and river flooding, sediment sampling through a field survey, and topographic measurement and obtain experience in international interdisciplinary collaborative works. 

Essential Skills and Behaviours

• Interest in pursuing an environmental sciences career 
• Attendance at the Undergraduate Summer Research Internship professional development programme 

Desirable Skills and Behaviours

• Having a basic knowledge of hydraulics and sediment transport is recommended. 

Internship Supervisor Name

Dr. Masashi Watanabe

Lecturer at School of Ocean and Earth Science

masashi.watanabe@soton.ac.uk

Faculty of Environmental and Life Sciences

School of Ocean and Earth Science

Which campus will the intern be based at during the internship?

Waterfront Campus

Eutrophication, or nutrient enrichment, has been an issue that has been negatively impacting lakes across the globe. Water resource managers and policymakers have sought to mitigate the effects of eutrophication through lake management over the last 20-30 years, but the process of recovery from impacted conditions is still poorly understood. As part of the NERC-funded RESTORE project led by Prof. Pete Langdon, the student would have a unique opportunity to explore the changes in nutrient levels after known management activities have occurred by reconstructing changes to total phosphorus and carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes through the analysis of lake sediments using standard palaeolimnological procedures. The student would generate their own data and then use that to create a simple model of change within the lake system over time. Prof. Langdon would provide overall supervision, with support of other RESTORE members – Dr. Richard Walton providing laboratory/palaeolimnological supervision and Dr. Timothy Foster providing statistical/modelling supervision.

Laboratory analysis, with necessary training and guidance, would be conducted using the world-class facilities at the University of Southampton. This project would allow a student to develop useful laboratory and modelling skills that can be used in a range of fields, with a particular benefit for those in the fields related to freshwater science. Work conducted by the student may be included in future outputs (publications) arising from the RESTORE project, and the student would be made a part of the decision and output process regarding anything arising from their work. 

Essential Skills and Behaviours

• Familiar with concepts of freshwater science 
• Interest in pursuing an environmental sciences career
• Attendance at the Undergraduate Summer Research Internship professional development programme

Desirable Skills and Behaviours

• Some familiarity with use of sediments, geochemistry and/or environmental change 
• Understanding of basic quantitative statistical methods such as calculating correlation coefficients
• Some basic familiarity with statistical or modelling software  

Note that we will provide some training in all these areas, hence if a student has some but not all of these competencies, they could still do the project, with support/training from the supervisory team and a willingness to learn.

Internship Supervisor Name

Prof. Pete Langdon

Associate Dean, Geography and Environmental Science

p.g.langdon@soton.ac.uk

Faculty of Environmental and Life Sciences

Geography and Environmental Science

Which campus will the intern be based at during the internship?

Highfield Campus

The 2022 volcanic eruption of Hunga Volcano in the South Pacific was the most explosive volcanic eruption this century, generating an eruption plume that reached the mesosphere, tsunamis with run-ups exceeding 20 m, and devastating submarine density flows that damaged the domestic and international subsea cables that connect The Kingdom of Tonga to the internet. Fieldwork conducted one week after the tsunami and again 3 years after the tsunamis collected sediment cores through beach deposits formed by the tsunamis, providing a record of a well constrained volcanic tsunami event and the deposit evolution. By characterising this deposit in detail, we can better understand the record of tsunamis in other locations and better quantify the risk to pacific island nations from volcanic tsunamis. 

In this project the student will examine X-CT scans through the cores and participate in analysis of the cores at BOSCORF using the MSCL and ITRAX. They will split the cores and characterise the sediment properties, including grain size, components, and volcanic signatures, including SEM work to characterise material, to build a detailed model of the deposit and link it to records of the tsunamis and the eruption.  

Essential Skills and Behaviours

• Interest in pursuing an environmental sciences career 

• Attendance at the Undergraduate Summer Research Internship professional development programme 

Desirable Skills and Behaviours

• Interest in volcanic and marine hazards 

• Any experience of sedimentological characterisation and/or volcaniclastic analysis 

Internship Supervisor Name

Isobel Yeo

Senior Research Geoscientist

Internship Supervisor Email Address

I.Yeo@noc.ac.uk

Plankton are a critical component of marine ecosystems and serve a vital role in the global climate cycle. Due to their small size and complex population dynamics, they are extremely difficult to study and monitor. Marine ecologists are increasingly using image-based sampling methods to study plankton at higher spatial and temporal frequency than ever before. But these new techniques have created new challenges for data analysis: we suddenly have more imagery than can be processed by human experts.

Scientists at NOC mainly use two tools, the FlowCam and PlanktoScope, to enhance data collection and improve our knowledge on plankton biodiversity and ecology. Our team of ecologists and computer scientists will mentor a student in end-to-end plankton data collection and analysis, from water sampling to computer vision-based analysis of imagery.

The successful candidate will: collect water samples from the NOC Pontoon, process them at NOC with benchtop imaging systems, and build a machine learning pipeline to classify the resulting data. The student will be provided access to analytical laboratories at NOCS, will learn to collect plankton samples, and image the samples with the FlowCam and PlanktoScope. This will consist of hands-on experience with both platforms and instruction on plankton taxonomy.

The student will work with Elena Garcia-Martin, a plankton biogeochemist and manager of the FlowCam and PlanktoScope instruments at NOC, to accomplish the collection and imaging of the plankton. With the data they collect, the student will contribute to the training of a machine learning model for classifying the plankton images taxonomically. The student will learn about model selection, fine-tuning best practices, and evaluation procedures. The NOC AI Team (consisting of Alex Baldwin, Jonathan Coney and Eric Orenstein) will provide training and support as the student executes their analysis on NOC compute resources.

Their work will contribute to on-going model and workflow development by the AI Team to support automated plankton population monitoring.The student will be expected to write a short scientific report on their work, supervised by the project mentors. This will be transformed into a poster and short presentation to be given within NOC, helping the student build experience with scientific presentations.We intend to release results, ML model weights and raw image data under the CC-BY license. All software will be released under GPL open source licenses. The student will retain rights to their own report, but we will encourage them to release it under a CC-BY license as an introduction to the Open Access movement.

Essential Skills and Behaviours

• Interest in pursuing an environmental sciences career
• Attendance at the Undergraduate Summer Research Internship professional development programme 

Desirable Skills and Behaviours

• Keen interest in biology and computing
• Basic knowledge of Python is desirable but not required 
• Willingness to learn

Internship Supervisor Name
Alex Baldwin

Faculty of Environmental and Life Sciences

Which campus will the intern be based at during the internship?

National Oceanography Centre