International Advisory Board

The purpose of the SAGES International Advisory Committee is to maximise both it's international potential ans it's capacity to provide benefit to Scotland. The committee consists of members from international researchers, research councils, industry and relevant environment agencies. AdCom meets once a year and is chaired independently to offer advice and support to the SAGES Director, Andy Kerr and Science Director, Trevor Hoey.

Prof. Alastair J. Fraser, Exploration Manager Offshore Libya, British Petroleum Exploration. Alastair has worked for BP as a Petroleum Geologist/Exploration Manager for over 30 years. His career in petroleum exploration, has taken him to all corners of the world including N. America, Europe, Africa, Middle East and the Far East. Following the BP Amoco merger, he led the team which made the significant Plutonio discovery in Block 18, deepwater Angola. He is the author of many papers on the Petroleum Geology of extensional basins most notably on the North Sea Jurassic and northern England Carboniferous. He is an Honorary Professor of Petroleum Geology at the University of Manchester.

Councillor Alison Hay, is COSLA's Regeneration and Sustainability Spokesperson. Formerly a civil servant, she is a member of the Scottish Liberal Democrat Group on Argyll and Bute Council and was Leader of the Council itself from 1999 to 2001. She is a member of the Agency Board of SEPA and Chairs the Board of Auchindrain Museum and is a board member of Kilmartin Museum. She sits on the First Minister’s Energy Agency and The Rural Development Committee. She is a foundermember of GRAB, the Group for Recycling in Argyll and Bute.

Prof. Trevor Hoey, SAGES Science Director, Trevor Hoey is Professor of Numerical Geoscience and Head of the Department of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow. In 1989, Prof. Hoey was awarded a PhD from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and he became a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Geography in 1990. From 1990 to 1992 he worked as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield. Prof. Hoey joined the University of Glasgow in 1992 as Lecturer in Geography and was later promoted to Senior Lecturer. He was appointed Professor of Numerical Geoscience in 2003 and two years later became Head of Department. His research interests include: Sediment transport processes in gravel-bed rivers;The dynamics of braided rivers;Numerical modelling of sediment transport and landscape evolution and the geomorphological basis of river management.

Paul Jowitt is Professor of Civil Engineering Systems and Executive Director of the Scottish Institute of Sustainable Technology at Heriot Watt University. He is President-Elect of the Institution of Civil Engineers, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Board Member of Scottish Water from 2002-2008. Paul Jowitt's major consultancy and research interests concern the issues of sustainable development, risk, and the development of systems-level solutions within civil engineering, the built environment, and environmental management. These activities include the development of sustainability strategies, policies, and decision-making frameworks for industry, the public sector, higher education and professional institutions in the UK and internationally. Current activity also includes the development of solution frameworks for the UN Millennium Development Goals. He is Editor of the International Journal "Civil Engineering and Environmental Systems", a former Editor of the Institution of Civil Engineer's Water, Maritime and Energy Journal (1998-2001). He is a founder member of "The Edge" an ICE/RIBA/CIBSE Ginger Group created to increase public and political awareness of the role of engineers and architects.

Dr. Andy Kerr , Director SAGES, University of Edinburgh In summer 2009, Dr. Kerr took over as Director of SAGES. He has been working at the University of Edinburgh since 2008, having spent the previous few years working in the private sector. He is also Director of E3 International, an environmental company which works with major corporations and non-governmental organisations to support their responses to the shift in environmental regulation - from traditional command and control measures to more subtle, more complex and more sophisticated approaches often characterised by market-based instruments and mechanisms. He obtained my doctorate in climate change from the University of Edinburgh, examining the stability of the Antarctic ice sheet.

Prof. Nick McCave, Emeritus Professor, University of Cambridge. Prof. McCave's research areas include climate change and earth-oceans- atmosphere systems. His research aims to understand how the modern deep ocean circulation shapes the sea bed and controls the distribution of sediment types, grain-sizes and bedforms. I then apply that understanding to interpretation of the geological record of the changing deep-sea circulation in piston and gravity cores for the late Pleistocene, and Ocean Drilling Project cores for the Neogene and earlier Pleistocene. Insight developed over the last 30 years concerning mechanics of fine sediment erosion, transport, aggregation and deposition shows that sediments become more cohesive, and all form aggregates, below 10 µm grainsize, but above that size they increasingly behave non-cohesively and are sorted by prevailing currents. This 'sortable silt' (10-63 µm) has a mean size that provides a proxy for depositional current speed and allows insight into changes in deep circulation vigour.

Prof. Martin Siegert, is Head of the School of Geoscience, University of Edinburgh, which he joined in August 2006. He joined the Bristol Glaciology Centre as a lecturer in January, 1999 and became its Director in 2005. He read Geological Geophysics at the University of Reading between 1986 and 1989, and later undertook his Ph.D. at the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge from 1990 to 1993. During 1994 he remained in Cambridge, working as a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant. He was a lecturer in the Centre for Glaciology, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, between 1994 and 1998. His research interests include: Glaciology and Quaternary Science; the study and exploration of Antarctic subglacial lakes; antarctic Climate Evolution, and in particular using geophysical data and modelling to understand past changes to the ice sheet.

Prof. Hans von Storch, Uiversity of Hamburg, Germany. Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Hans von Storch is a director of the Institute for Coastal Research of the GKSS Research Centre, professor at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg and a memember of the Stereing Committee of the CLISAP Center of Excellence on Climate Research of Hamburg Univeristy. His research interests are coastal climate and impact (wind, storms urges and waves) in recent times and in possible futures, and methodical issues of statistical climatology (such as detection and attribution of anthropogenic climate change, or utility of proxy data). He is engaged in transdisciplinary reasearch with social and cultural scientists since for years.

Prof. Heinz Wanner, Uiversity of Bern, Switzerland. Heinz Wanner studied geography, climatology and mathematics in Bern and Grenoble (France). He then got a postdoc at the Atmospheric Science Department of the Colorado State University in Fort Collins and worked as a deputy director of the large Alpine Experiment of the UNESCO GARP programme. In his first "scientific life" Heinz Wanner worked on regional meteorology, mountain meteorology and air pollution dispersion. After being nominated a full professor at the University of Bern, his colleagues Hans Oeschger and Bruno Messerli pushed Heinz Wanner to jump into a second "scientific life". Since this time Heinz Wanner works on global and regional paleoclimate reconstructions and diagnostics at different time scales between the last few hundred years and the Holocene (past 12’000 years). Heinz Wanner is the acting president of the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Bern and a co-chair of the IGPB-PAGES (Past Global Changes) programme. In 2006 he got the Vautrin Lud prize, the inofficial nobel prize in geography.

Alf Young, Journalist. Alf Young has been a journalist for most of his working life. Since 1986 he has held a number of executive roles at The Herald. Throughout, he has been a regular columnist on business, economic and political issues, and is currently Assistant Editor with responsibility for all the paper's comment and analysis. Before entering journalism in his thirties, Alf was a teacher and lecturer and, briefly, a political researcher. Born and raised in Greenock, the son of a shipyard craftsman, he holds degrees in natural philosophy and education. He has also been awarded honorary degrees by four Scottish universities. Alf was a member of the group which helped devise the financial arrangements for Scotland's devolved government. He has served on BP's Scottish advisory board, and, since 2000, has chaired the Glasgow advisory board of Common Purpose. A season ticket holder at Cappielow, Alf and his two sons are to be found at most Morton games, home and away.