Faculty of Environmental and Life Sciences' Inaugural Lecture series

Join us for an exciting event in the Charnock Lecture Theatre at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, where we will be hosting a series of engaging lectures from newly appointed Professors at the Faculty of Environmental and Life Sciences.

During the event, our Professors will present a lecture to highlight their research, real-world impact and future research directions.

At our next event on Wednesday 3 December 2025, Professor Stephanie Henson from the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Professor Julian Leyland from the School of Geography and Environmental Science, will be presenting their research.

Professor Stephanie Henson is a Principal Scientist at the National Oceanography Centre and Honorary Professor at the University of Southampton. She leads a large, active research group in global biogeochemical oceanography. Her particular research interests aim at understanding the natural variability and climate change effects on phytoplankton populations, and subsequent impacts on the biological carbon pump. Her research exploits autonomous vehicles, satellite and in situ data, as well as output from biogeochemical models. In 2024, she received the European Geosciences Union’s Fridtjof Nansen medal for “outstanding research into the ocean’s role in the carbon cycle, built on her extraordinary ability to combine diverse observational data with novel biogeochemical models.” She was a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 6th Assessment Report, on the chapter “Carbon and other biogeochemical cycles and feedbacks”.

Professor Julian Leyland is Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Southampton and Director of the Environmental Sensing @ Southampton (ES@S) facility. He has been at the University since 2001, when he joined as an undergraduate student, before completing his PhD in 2009, since when he has since developed his academic career. Over the past two decades, he has worked extensively in river basins and coastal environments around the world, combining fieldwork, modelling, and remote sensing to understand how landscapes evolve.

His research explores how water and sediment move through landscapes, from hillslopes and rivers to estuaries and coasts, and how these processes shape the world around us. He uses a wide range of tools and technologies, from drones, boats and satellite imagery to detailed laboratory analyses, to understand how rivers and coasts respond to natural changes and human activity. Julian’s work helps reveal how sediment transport and erosion influence the stability of landscapes, and the evolving hazards that they present on the human population that depend on the world’s rivers, deltas and coasts.

Much of his current research focuses on global sediment and water dynamics, including projects that investigate how climate change, land use and sand mining affect the movement of water and sediment from source to sea.