Chris has supervised 14 PhD students, five of whom now have lectureships and five have research posts. He has acted as external examiner on PhDs in Britain, Sweden and France, as an associate editor for the Annals of Glaciology, and guest editor for Boreas. He is currently external examiner for the Aberystwyth MSc in Glaciology, and serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of Earth Surface Processes and Landforms.

Chris is a member of subpanel 17, 'Geography, Environment Studies and Archaeology', in the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF2014) which aims to assess the quality of research in UK universities.

Current Research:

The common theme is the use of Earth Observation (EO, ie satellite imagery) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to gain a larger scale perspective than is permitted by field observations alone. For some cases, straightforward use of imagery is sufficient and in others methodological advances have been required. My emphasis has not been on 'how can such data be used' but rather on 'making advances in knowledge' from it. I have published on a wide range of Earth Observation methods and applications, including palaeo-glaciology, snowcover mapping, archaeology, coral reef, seagrass and mangrove assessment.

My primary research interest is in glacial geomorphology, in particular the understanding of processes that lead to the formation of subglacial bedforms (drumlins, flutes etc), and the inverse solution that uses the pattern and distribution of such landforms to reconstruct the behaviour of ice sheets that existed during the last glaciation. I choose to use satellite imagery for these purposes because they frequently permit new evidence to be detected and because they allow mapping at a scale compatible with the former ice sheet.

The ultimate aim of this work is to build up a detailed picture of the evolution of former ice sheets through the last glacial cycle and to use this information to improve both ice sheet and climate models. Part of this research effort has necessarily involved EO and GIS methodology development.

A five year NERC consortium project, BRITICE-CHRONO, started in 2012. Chris leads this endeavor which involves some 40+ researchers from eight universities, plus the British Geological Survey, British Antarctic Survey, NERC's radiocarbon facility and Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre. The focus is on the former British-Irish Ice Sheet. They want to know how rapidly ice retreated across the continental shelf and across the marine-to-terrestrial transition and then use this knowledge to improve numerical ice sheet models that will be used to predict changes in our existing ice sheets. Improved data on ice retreat rates will also be of great use to provide the longer term (100-1,000 year) context against which contemporary observations (years to decades) can be assessed. Some 200 locations around the British Isles have been identified and will be accessed using a NERC ship and by intensive fieldwork onshore, leading to an anticipated 800 new dates to constrain the retreat rate.

Highlights of my research are:

• Mega-scale glacial lineations
• Ice sheet reconstructions
• Palaeo ice streams
• The British Ice Sheet - BRITICE
• Drumlins