Personal History

Personal History:

I was born in Shannon (Limerick), Ireland but grew up in Dublin. I developed an interest in hills, mountains, landscape, cycling, Ordnance Survey maps and (most importantly) the weather from an early age, keeping a weather diary from age four. I went on to study Earth Sciences as a Bachelor's degree at Trinity College Dublin because it was the subject closest to my interests at the time - I was also attracted to the old architecture of Trinity.

My obsession with the weather and climate continued to grow, and as there was no Meteorology degree of any kind in Ireland at the time, I left in 1994 (initially thinking of being away for only 1 year) to study for a Masters in Meteorology at the University of Reading in England. It was here that I met my wife-to-be, June Christine, from Glasgow. After graduating, I worked as a weather forecaster and meteorologist in various guises, as well as temping for Yellow Pages (electronic media) on two occasions. We grew fond of Reading and made many friends. We stayed in (or near) to Reading until 1999.

An itchy foot (or two) inspired us to move on - and a chance to go to Canada came up - where my wife obtained a post-doctoral fellowship in early 2000. Soon after arriving, I was lucky to obtain a number of contracts with Environment Canada (Toronto); initially as a webmaster working on the display of real-time snow and ice conditions across Canada; later I worked on the digitisation of historical Canadian climate records and climate reconstruction with Dr. Victoria Slonosky and Prof. Francis Zwiers.

Alas, all was to end in 2002, when my wife got a new job at the University of Bern (Switzerland) where we stayed until spring 2009. The snow was not quite as deep, nor the cold as intense as Canada, but there were new opportunities - I learnt French and German, and also learnt to ski (a little bit). But the biggest lesson to learn was living and participating in a foreign culture, and Switzerland is unique and was much unlike what we were used to previously. Our lives completely changed with the birth of our daughter, Ailsa in 2003; Daniel arrived later in 2006. Soon after arriving in Switerland, I enrolled on a rather unique PhD (site selection for large telescopes using climate data) at the University of Fribourg (Geography under Prof. Martin Beniston), later transferring to the University of Bern (Applied Physics, with Prof. Christian Matzler), which I finally completed in 2008 after great struggles.

I had been aware of, and was very much interested in the developing Scottish University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) for some time, and so when the time came to move on from Switzerland, I applied for a research position in renewable energy at Lews Castle College. As a family, we are adapting to Island life - the children are in the Gaelic education - and a further baby arrived (Brendan) in July 2009. 

Whilst at Lews Castle College from 2009 to 2011, I worked mainly on a range of renewable energy projects (the "Greenspace" project), but in 2011 the opportunity arose to teach Climate Change, Climate and Energy related subjects - at the end of the first year I can say that it has been a great success to date!