ECR Alumni Case Study – Jen Roberts

What did you study at university?

I started out studying Natural Sciences at Durham University, and then switched partway through to solely Earth Sciences. In my final year, I learnt about CO2 geological storage – just through conversation with lecturers, it wasn’t part of the course in 2007. A viva formed part of my final year assessment, and my external examiner was Professor Sue Rigby from the University of Edinburgh. Towards the end of the viva discussion, Sue asked about my next steps so I shared that I was really interested in carbon capture and storage, and that I’d applied for an opportunity to do an extended paid internship, starting as soon as I graduated, with a company called Ikon Science. Sue mentioned the Scottish Carbon Capture and Storage (SCCS) research group led by Professor Stuart Haszeldine at the University of Edinburgh, and gave me Stuart’s email address.

My role at Ikon Science was to explore options for upgrading their RokDoc software to include CO2. I learnt a lot about subsurface fluid flow, equation of state modelling, geophysical workflows, and software development – including coding. It was essentially a very applied research project! Ikon Science were keen to scope the opportunity to offer a “CCS ready” product for a potentially burgeoning global CCS industry. This was 2008!

My extended internship was a transformational experience personally and professionally: I learnt so much from exposure to the industry, the professional workplace, the various clients and fantastic colleagues across geoscience and software development and technical support teams. Despite enjoying the work and experiences with Ikon Science, the more I read and learnt, the more I could see there were still so many research gaps, and so many research questions to answer. This was the early days of the financial crash and I realised that industry opportunities in CCS might soon crash too, but could there be opportunities in research?

Jen on fieldwork in Italy during her PhD research, examining structures in a fault zone. Nowadays, of course, she’d be wearing a hard hat and hi-vis jacket!

I emailed Stuart, told him what I was doing and explained that I was interested in CCS research – particularly around de-risking CO2 geological storage by investigating the role of faults. I successfully interviewed for a PhD with SCCS and moved to Edinburgh in 2009. Under the supervision of Professor Rachel Wood, Stuart and others, I studied natural CO2 seeps as analogues to inform understanding of CO2 migration – particularly what we can learn about storage containment, monitoring, and environmental health. It was great to be part of an active and engaged research community within SCCS and its wider stakeholder networks. In addition, Rachel co-founded a carbonate research group which bridged across the University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University, so I spent time at both. Throughout my PhD there were various paid and unpaid opportunities for wider activities including teaching and outreach, and I particularly enjoyed a few days’ work experience at Edinburgh’s media centre, where I got to try my hand at writing press releases.

What happened when you finished your PhD?

I did my PhD thinking that I was going to get back into industry, although as it progressed, I also started wondering about roles in think tanks or science media. I enjoyed discovering, analysing and communicating – which is actually at the heart of research too. But a key motivation was that my work had real world application and that I was part of a team. Surely, research wasn’t for me?

When you’re in a healthy connected research community though, you don’t just have your supervisors, but also postdocs, other PhDs and members of staff who you’re connecting and liaising with. One of these people was Dr Mark Naylor.

Mark successfully bid in the UKCCSRC’s first rounds of Flexible Funding and his project had a budget for a short postdoc role to scope research priorities following the QICS project, a CO2 release facility just offshore Scotland which had simulated a CO2 release to seabed. The work linked really nicely with, and followed on from, my PhD, and so I applied for the job. Importantly for my subsequent career direction, the project introduced me to qualitative research methods – including surveys, interviews and thematic analysis – in this case to elicit and evaluate scientific needs. The work engaged widely with both UK and international academics and I got to make great connections, such as with people like Dr. Linda Stalker at CSIRO in Australia, who I’ve worked with since.

It was a relatively short postdoc, but it allowed me to see what post-doctoral life is like, and how connected and collaborative it can be – I was part of an interested, supportive, research team. Mark also told me about the “leaky pipeline” – that there are fewer and fewer women in academia as you go through the career stages. That stuck with me. Tell me there’s a trend like that, and my instinct will be to go against it. It’s a mix of being contrary and tackling injustice.

Not long after that, I represented Edinburgh at a careers event, where I met Professor Zoe Shipton from the University of Strathclyde. I’d read loads of her papers for my PhD as she’s an absolute doyen of faults and fluid flow. We chatted about work, my research and interests, and she told me about a postdoc opportunity that would be opening up in the next few months that might interest me.

Having key mentors and people at the right time is incredibly important – they can open up pathways to you and highlight things you weren’t aware of. If Zoe hadn’t talked to me about the postdoc opportunity at that event, given the title, job description and the way it was written, I wouldn’t have thought it was for me – it was focused on risk and uncertainty, with little mention of geology or CO2 storage. I had only published one paper at this point – though there were several more in preparation. I did find it amusing that I was attending a careers fair as a representative, but gleaned careers advice and opportunities for myself as a result!

I wasn’t super set on a career in research, but I decided to give it a go. I interviewed successfully and started at Strathclyde. My postdoc was funded by ClimateXChange – Scotland’s centre for expertise connecting climate change, research and policy – and my research responded to questions Scottish Government needed answering. During the different projects I worked on over those years, I learned a lot about policy and decision making, citizen participation, whole system sustainability and many things that I remain fascinated by.

Did you move into lecturing from there?

Jen receiving her award for Scottish Energy Researcher of the Year 2015: Energy and Society

I’m Senior Lecturer now but I worked as a postdoc for quite a long time. I finished my PhD in 2012, bridged 2012-13 with that postdoc with Mark, then started the ClimateXChange postdoc in 2013. I was postdoc-ing for nearly eight years, with the money coming from different sources. About the same time as my ClimateXChange post finished, Zoe was made Head of Department, and I was part funded to cover her teaching and support her research . This meant I was getting not just teaching and research experience, but also lots of other skills like building networks, writing research bids, facilitating workshops, you name it. By this time I was hooked on academia, and was writing research fellowships, trying to get my own funded position. I wanted to stay on a research-focused or knowledge-exchange career trajectory.

I got my Chancellors’ Fellowship in 2019, and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2021.

Fantastic! When in this journey did you first engage with the UKCCSRC? And in what ways have you engaged with the Centre over the course of your career?

I would have first engaged with the UKCCSRC during my PhD, as Stuart was connected with it, and I was in Edinburgh when Jon (Gibbins, UKCCSRC Director) moved up from Imperial. And, as mentioned, my first postdoc with Mark was funded through the UKCCSRC. If I hadn’t got that post, then I might not have stayed in academia, so that funding was fundamental to retaining me. It plugged a little hole in the pipeline!

When I moved to Strathclyde, I applied for Flexible Funding from the UKCCSRC a couple of times and didn’t get it. That was my first experience of writing a semi substantive research proposal and allowed me to hone and craft some of that early research proposal writing. The UKCCSRC also had several collaboration funding opportunities, including for international collaborations. I successfully got one of those and was able to go and work with Linda Stalker (CSIRO, Australia), and another different award to work with Dr Andrew Feitz (Geoscience Australia). These are lasting collaborations, and we’ve now had joint projects and studentships together.

Jen at the In Situ Lab field experiment in Western Australia in 2019 – she had to cut this research activity short to get back to Scotland for her Chancellors Fellowship interview. Worth it!

My postdoc roles were not specifically on CCS topics and, after the ClimateXChange position, I didn’t have an allocated pot of money to use for training and development. To have the UKCCSRC offering me free travel and accommodation for its events meant that I was able to connect with the community, as well as keeping up to date with research, without having to ask or justify or apply for funds to be able to go. UKCCSRC secondments/exchanges with collaborators in Australia really allowed me to focus on and publish CCS research.

Jen speaking at IEAGHG Summer School in 2017 – on the environmental impacts of CCS

The UKCCSRC research collaborations, especially the international ones, were also key to strengthening my case for Fellowships. In 2017, I was able to be an expert mentor on the IEAGHG Summer School, with UKCCSRC support. And in 2022, I became the UKCCSRC Deputy Director and ECR Champion! That, together with a few other funding awards and successes, basically meant that I could go for my promotion.

We’re so pleased to hear all of that! Do you have any other thoughts you want to share about CCS in general – its present, its future, concerns, etc?

I think my primary concern, and something I just published on, is potential inequalities in how CCS is scaled up globally and the types of CCS that get developed. Essentially, what’s coming around is that if you’ve had a historic oil and gas sector, then you’re in a very good position to develop CCS. That means that you can hit your climate targets sooner and at lower cost. You can even make money from CO2 geological storage by taking CO2 from other countries. But countries that have never developed an oil and gas sector don’t have the opportunity for CCS development, so they’re having to pay out the most, despite having contributed the least to climate breakdown. It comes back to global justice. There are things that we, as the CCS community, can do to challenge and advocate for open data and fairness.

Jen now – at the launch of the Strathclyde Institute for Sustainable Communities (SISC) in 2024. She co-directs SISC.

I’m also concerned that I’m hearing a lot about CCS jobs, skills and money, but not about place-based just-transition approaches. If we’re going to see inclusive transitions that work for the communities in which they’re taking place, then we need transitional development that’s appropriate to that community, in that place and that context – which will support that community to thrive. This is important work on the social science aspects of CCS for industrial decarbonisation and negative emissions, which fantastic researchers like Claire Gough, Diarmaid Clery, Patrick Devine-Wright, David Reiner, their teams and many others are working on. We really need to talk about it more in order for CCS to bring co-benefits to the people these developments affect most. In fact, we need to move beyond talking about it, to fully respecting and embedding it.