Tommy Matthews

Profile

I am a first-year PhD researcher on the NERC Panorama DTP, looking to develop methods for monitoring bird and insect populations using operational weather surveillance radar networks. I will be working with Dr Chris Hassall (Faculty of Biological Sciences) and Dr Ryan Neely III (National Centre for Atmospheric Science) as part of the BioDAR project (https://biodarproject.org/). 

I graduated from the University of Oxford in 2020 with a masters degree in Physics, specialising in Atmospheric Physics. My masters project used a novel unsupervised machine learning tool to study causal relationships in cloud formation. Since graduating, I have gained two years experience working as a professional data scientist.

This project will use physics based models to study the electromagnetic scattering properties of birds and insects on the UK’s new dual-polarisation weather surveillance network. We will look to validate these models using simulated radar product, and provide taxonomic meaning to existing unsupervised cluster analyses of the weather surveillance data. 

This will allow for the extraction of significant ecological information from the existing weather surveillance data, providing ecologists with a powerful tool to assess biodiversity and conservation measures across the UK, and gain new insights into the behaviour of airborne organisms. 

 

Research interests

- Aeroecology

- Atmospheric Physics

- Ecology and Conservation

- Radar and Observational Meteorology 

- Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

Qualifications

• MPhys Physics (specialising in Atmospheric Physics), University of Oxford