FELS Inaugural Lecture series

Join us for an exciting event in the Henry Charnock lecture theatre in the School of Ocean and Earth Science at the University of Southampton's Waterfront Campus where we will be hosting a series of engaging lectures from newly appointed Professors at the Faculty of Environmental and Life Sciences.

During the event, our Professors will present a lecture to highlight their research, real-world impact and future research directions.

At our next event on Wednesday 18 June 2025, Professor Clive Trueman from the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Professor Dianna Smith from the School of Geography and Environmental Science will be presenting their research.

Professor Trueman specialises in developing and using natural tracers to reconstruct aspects of animal behaviour and ecology. He started his academic life as a geologist with a PhD from Bristol studying dinosaurs, then briefly worked in human evolution at the Smithsonian Institution in the US, scientific archaeology at the Weizmann Institute in Israel and forensics before taking up a lectureship in Southampton in 2007. Based in the School of Ocean and Earth Science, he now focuses mostly on applying geochemical methods to marine animal ecology. Prof Trueman regularly contributes to international working groups on fish and fisheries science and the use of natural tracers in ecological research. He has given evidence supporting fisheries policy to the UK parliament and EU commission.

Professor Smith specialises in health inequalities, particularly those linked to where people live and their diet. She uses a range of methods from spatial microsimulation to surveys and interviews to understand the range of influences on population and individual health. 

During her PhD at the University of Leeds and subsequent MRC postdoctoral fellowship, she modelled the health impacts of local food environments. However, her interest in food price inequalities dates to 2003 and her MSc at Oregon State University. 

She moved to Southampton in 2015 to take up a Lectureship and was able to develop research projects in collaboration with local government and third sector organisations, supported by Public Policy|Southampton.  In 2016 she first published a neighbourhood level risk measure for food poverty in England. These data and maps are now updated annually and used extensively by local authorities to target interventions such as food aid. Recent NHIR ARC funded research has evaluated the impact of food aid on diet quality, health and wellbeing. 

She is deputy director of ESRC’s National Centre for Research Methods and co-Director of Centre for the South, a policy think tank which addresses the University’s civic agenda through knowledge exchange and academic engagement to inform place-based decision making. She is a trustee of Citizens Advice New Forest. 

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