Professor Robert Andrew Spicer

Biography

I am an Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences in the Department of Environment, Earth and Ecosystems and a Senior Visiting Professor at the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing (http://english.ib.cas.cn/). Trained initially as a botanist at Imperial College London I subsequently obtained a PhD in Geology, also at Imperial College. That was followed by a three year period working with the United States Geological Survey at Menlo Park California first as a Lindemann Fellow and then as a Research Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences. On my return to the UK my first lecturing position was in the Life Sciences department of Goldsmiths College, London, followed by a move to Oxford University where I was a lecturer in Earth Sciences and a Fellow of St Hugh's College. I moved to the Open University as Professor and Head of Earth Sciences in 1994 and subsequently became the founding director of CEPSAR.

Research Interest

I have ongoing interests in using fossil plants as indicators of past climates with particular emphasis on the polar environments at times of global warmth, the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau and the development of the Asian Monsoon. I have an active research program in collaboration with staff at the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, for the development of the quantitative plant-based palaeoclimate proxy known as CLAMP (Climate Leaf Analysis Multivariate Program)