Neville Exon reports that Leanne Armand from Macquarie University will replace him as the Project Scientist for ANZIC (Aus-NZ IODP Constorium) in September 2017, with several weeks’ overlap with Neville Exon before he steps back to an honorary position at ANU.
Leanne says “I’m honoured to have been selected as the new ANZIC program manager. I’m committed to broadly engaging with the marine science community to maintain momentum and continue to improve our engagement with universities, industry and government bodies. My aim is to succeed in sustaining and enhancing our Australian and New Zealand IODP involvement. I look forward to working with Neville and the various committees from September and bringing my skills and experience to the leadership of the program into the future.”
Leanne has been the ANZIC representative on the ECORD Facility Board and the ANZIC Science Committee for several years, so she understands IODP and ANZIC very well. She is an expert in Southern Ocean diatom taxonomy, and has a strong interest in the distribution of individual species related to the physical oceanic environment, and the subsequent preservation of this environmental relationship in the fossil record. She uses the records of fossil diatoms in deep sea cores between Australia and Antarctica to estimate past climatic conditions, such as sea ice extent and sea surface temperatures over the last glacial cycles (~240,000 yr). She was the Chief Scientist of the very successful palaeoceanographic mission to the Sabrina Coast, East Antarctica, on Australia’s new research vessel the RV Investigator (2017). She is the Director of the national Collaborative Australian Postgraduate Sea Training Alliance Network (CAPSTAN) designing a Master-level training at sea program with the Marine National Facility and on the RV Investigator from mid-2017, and was a Deputy Director of the new Macquarie University Marine Research Centre, MQ Marine 2015-2016. She recently took up the three-year role of council member of the International Society of Diatom Research (2016).
