I am an independent geoscientist with a particular interest in natural hazards, and seem to have spent a lot of my career investigating the physical, archaeological and anthropological evidence for past tsunamis. My PhD was on the relatively recent geology of a valley in British Columbia, Canada, with an MSc on the sediment transport characteristics of a braided river in Alberta, Canada.  As it turned out these postgraduate studies, coupled with my love for SCUBA diving, were the perfect training for a lifelong interest in, what was at the time I started, the fledging study of past tsunamis.

I was born in England, but lived four years in Canada while doing my postgraduate degrees, moving for 15 years to New Zealand (I am now also a New Zealand citizen) and then Australia for eight years before returning to Wales. After decades of work in assorted earth science research jobs in Australasia including being Director of the Australia-Pacific Tsunami Research Centre, I now hold positions as an Honorary Professor of Tsunami Research at the University of New South Wales in Australia and Visiting Professor in the School of Ocean and Earth Science, University of Southampton in the UK.

As an academic for much of my life, I was very much focussed on writing peer-reviewed papers and have well over 300 of those with my name on them. However, over the past couple of decades, I have completed several books starting with the co-edited book, The coast of New Zealand: Te Tai O Aotearoa (2003). This has been followed by two other co-edited books, Natural Hazards in the Asia-Pacific Region (2012) and Natural Hazards in Australasia (2016). In 2021 I co-authored (with Walter Dudley) Tsunami: The World’s Greatest Waves. My most recent book is In Search of Ancient Tsunamis: A Researcher’s Travels, Tools, and Techniques (2023).