Dr Job Kibii, Turkana Basin Institute, Kenya
Job Kibii is a palaeontologist and a palaeoanthropologist, with a multidisciplinary research program combining comparative anatomy, taxonomy, bone biology, and taphonomy to study: evolution; form and function; past biocommunity; paleoecology; paleo diet; paleoenvironment; and site formation processes. He has conducted fieldwork in the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa and he is working on projects in Baringo and Kilifi County in Kenya.
Session: Clastic Cave Deposits, and caves as repositories for fossils, archaeology and rock art.
Title: The Evolution of Cave Taphonomy: Past, Present and Future.
A/Prof Nick Scroxton, Assistant Professor, Maynooth University, Ireland
Nick Scroxton specialises in using stalagmite geochemistry to reconstruct past rainfall variability in southern hemisphere tropical monsoon systems (Madagascar, Indonesia) but has broad research interests relating to past climate variability in Ireland and elsewhere. He is also interested in the implications of past climate change, be it on megafaunal extinctions, societal transformations, human evolution, or in the aid and development sectors to climate proof real world adaptation strategies.
Session: Karst Records of Climate Variability on Orbital Timescales.
Talk: The Long Game: Unravelling Orbital Climate Variability Using Speleothems
Kim Tommy (ECR), CEO of Palaeontological Scientific Trust (PAST), South Africa
Kimberleigh Tommy is the Chief Executive Officer of the Palaeontological Scientific Trust (PAST), the largest, independent, African based non-profit organisation supporting research, education and public engagement in the origin sciences. She describes herself as a translator between the worlds of science and society. A biological anthropologist by training, she is dedicated to bridging the gap between the origin sciences and broader publics. Currently, she is completing her PhD at the Human Variation and IdentificationResearch Unit at the School of Anatomical Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand.
Session: Science communication, public outreach, transformation/EDI, best practices for field work and cave preservation.
Dr John Hellstrom, University of Melbourne, Australia
Originally from New Zealand, John developed interests in Caving and Quaternary stratigraphy as a student at Victoria University in the early 1990s. He initially worked to establish U-Th by MC-ICP-MS as a viable routine technique and is now the expert on dating speleothems on a great variety of projects, whilst seeking to improve U-series data interpretation, age-depth modelling and laser-ablation ICP-MS.
Session: Geochronology: analytical improvements, novel approaches, and innovative age modelling.
Talk: Dating difficult speleothems
Prof Nele Meckler, University of Bergen, Norway
Nele Meckler is a paleoclimatologist specializing in the development and application of new temperature proxies in marine and terrestrial archives. In Bergen, she leads facilities for clumped isotope thermometry and fluid inclusion analysis. Her primary focus is on improving our understanding of the climate system under different boundary conditions with the help of proxy constraints from geologic archives, covering the late Pleistocene ice age cycles (mostly speleothems) to early Cenozoic greenhouse climates (marine sediments).
Session: Innovation and developments in the lab, field, geochemical modelling and data processing.
Talk: Fluid inclusion microthermometry in speleothems – advances and limitations