Robert Cutler from Swire Education Trust tours NOCS and meets new Vice-Chancellor

From left to right: Boris Kelly-Gerreyn, Robert Cutler, Joanne Donahoe, Ed Hill

We were delighted to welcome Robert Cutler from the Swire Educational Trust to NOCS on Friday 11th September 2009. Robert toured the centre with Professor Ed Hill (Director of NOCS), Joanne Donahoe (Associate Director, Development Office) and Dr Boris Kelly-Gerreyn (Project Manager of SNOMS). Part of the tour included a video conferencing session with our partners at the University of Xiamen (China). Robert was introduced to Professor Minhan Dai and the new Swire PhD student, Zongpei Jiang. The Swire Educational Trust are generously funding Zongpei's 4 year PhD studentship which will bring him over to NOCS for his first three years to work on SNOMS data. This marks the start of an excellent collaboration between Southampton and Xiamen.

During the tour, Robert was joined by Dr David Hydes (Chief scientist of SNOMS) and Professor John Shepherd FRS. After the tour, Robert met with the new vice-chancellor Professor Don Nutbeam.

The visit was deemed a great success by all involved.

New route and new collaboration

When she gets to Singapore later this month the Pacific Celebes will start work on new route between west coast Canada and USA and Australia and New Zealand.

At the end of October she will arrive on Tauranga for the first time. The new route has resulted in new collaboration for the SNOMS project with Dr. Kim Currie from NIWA.
Kim is very keen to be involved, and is looking forward to the next step - perhaps a ship visit at Tauranga at the end of October.


Kim is an expert in the high-precision in situ pCO2 determination in surface seawater, and general carbon dioxide chemistry of seawater in the NZ region. Her work is part of a joint University of Otago-NIWA programme investigating, the CO2 chemistry of the New Zealand oceanic region. It aims to develop a better predictive capability for the role of this oceanic region as a sink for fossil fuel CO2.