Alumni Career Talks 2024
Alumni career talks enables our DTP PhD graduates to come back and speak to our current postgraduate students about how they have used skills and experience gained during their PhD to shape and direct their career path. The talks also give students the opportunity to ask questions about employability and career options ie. How did you get your current job? Which PhD skills have been most useful to you so far? Are there opportunities within your current organisation?
If you are a DTP graduate and would like to take part in a future Careers talk, then please contact gw4plus-dtp@bristol.ac.uk
If you are a current student please register here for a link to access the Careers Talk listed below. The talks will be delivered each month online on Wednesday afternoons at 2pm-2.45pm from January 2024. More talks will be added to this list periodically.
Change to time: Fabrice Ntimugura’s talk will now take place at 13.30
17 January 2024 - Dr Fabrice Ntimugura
Fabrice Ntimugura is a civil engineer with previous consultancy experience in civil infrastructures, buildings design and applied hydraulics. Fabrice holds a PhD in Civil Engineering, Materials and Sustainability from the University of Exeter and has written and contributed to many scholarly articles.
As a Buildings Energy and Materials Consultant at L&P Group, Fabrice has been involved in energy simulation, sustainability assessment, embodied carbon, energy and building regulations, operational energy assessment, construction materials appraisal and sustainability assessments.
14 February 2024 - Dr Serginio Remmelzwaal
Serginio Remmelzwaal has a PhD in geology from the University of Bristol focusing on palaeoceanography and geochemistry. Following his PhD Serginio worked as a scientific advisor for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to shape the UK government's strategy to assess air quality. Serginio then moved to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (now the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero) where he led international energy trade negotiations with the EU and Norway; the set-up of international electricity trading markets and policy; and delivery of electricity interconnectors. Serginio now works at National Grid Electricity System Operator on its strategy on electricity trade with the EU and Norway.
6 March 2024 - Dr Leanne Melbourne
Leanne has a PhD in geology from the University of Bristol focusing on the effect of environmental change on the structural integrity of un-attached corallines.
Leanne Melbourne is the Kathryn W. Davis Postdoctoral Fellow at American Museum of Natural History. By analysing the geological records held in museum collections, Leanne is investigating the link between environmental change and growth within marine organisms and the effect this has on structural integrity.
17 April 2024 - dr Ana Luisa de Almeida Serra Jorge da Silva
Ana is a phylogeneticist who is interested in aspects of large-scale and deep-time phylogenetic inference. She did her PhD at the Natural History Museum, London, and the University of Bristol, where she used the Amphibian Tree of Life as a model system to explore post-processing of tree distributions, missing data due to non-effective overlap, consensus methods and branch support.
She is now a postdoctoral researcher looking at early metazoan divergences.
8 May 2024 - DR JEROME BLEWETT
Jerome is currently a Policy Advisor at the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero, working on energy transition and decarbonisation policy on his first posting as a Science & Engineering Fast Streamer. Prior to this, he was an Agouron Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard University in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, with his research focusing on the interface between the carbon cycle and microbiology. Jerome completed his PhD in Chemistry at Bristol in 2020, supervised by Prof. Rich Pancost in the Organic Geochemistry Unit. During his PhD, he was seconded for 3-months to the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology as a Policy Fellow, working on climate change and the UK’s critical infrastructure, funded by the RSC.
5 June 2024 - Dr Rebecca Shellock
Please note: this talk will take place at the different time of 11am
Rebecca Shellock is a Research Fellow in Marine Social Science at the University of Tasmania (Australia). She works within the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) and Centre for Marine Socioecology (CMS).
Becca undertook her GW4+ PhD between 2015-2019 and she completed a UKRI policy internship at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in the last few months of her PhD. This subsequently led to her being employed as a Marine Social Scientist by Defra between 2019-2020. During this time, she provided expertise and aided the delivery of the Highly Protected Marine Areas (HPMA) review. Now funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, she is tackling the gaps she identified during her time at Defra and continues to research knowledge exchange and how to facilitate the science-policy interface.