News Archive

Professor Carolyn Oldham of the School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering knows about the wealth of environmental knowledge at UWA.

“UWA has a huge array of expertise in this area,” she said. “There are numerous environmental undergraduate and postgraduate programs, thriving environmental research groups, and many cross-campus collaborations.”

Carolyn saw a huge opportunity to draw all that expertise together.

“Environmental teachers and researchers have never had a cross-Faculty forum to hear about each others’ work, to hear from eminent visiting researchers, or expose postgraduate students to the interdisciplinary nature of environmental research,” she said.

So last May, she quietly launched the UWA Environment Seminars to do just that.

“We finally have a time and place to come together, to bring all of our environment researchers together,” she said.

Carolyn received some very positive feedback when she ran the seminars last semester. This semester, she promises they’ll be even more eclectic.

“I’m really keen to mix up the seminars, so we have marine scientists, environmental historians, environmental engineers, urban planners, landscape architects, botanists, hydrologists, all presenting in the same seminar series,” she said.

“We have such a lot to learn from the amazing variety of interests and expertise within UWA. And then of course we have our visiting researchers.”

The UWA Environment Seminars run during the semester, at 4pm on Tuesday afternoons, in the Webb Lecture Theatre in the Geography Building.

The first seminar will be on Tuesday, 4 August, with Gayan Gunaratne of the School of Earth and Environment presenting on tides, nutrients and climate affect aquatic plant growth in a coastal wetland.

Carolyn has always had eclectic interests, collaborating with engineers, microbiologists, geochemists, hydrologists, landscape architects, and others.

“I love exploring the different disciplinary ways of viewing the environment, understanding other perspectives, seeing where the overlaps are, and what we can learn from each other,” she said.

“Researchers, postgraduate and undergraduate students, and university visitors are all warmly welcome,” said Carolyn. “And if you are interested in presenting, please contact me on [email protected] .”