Staff profile

Millicent is a PhD student in the Department of Biosciences at Durham University looking at how the European Arctic forest-tundra ecotone is currently changing under climate warming and how the ecotone will change under future climate warming. She is supervised across Geography and Biosciences taking an interdisciplinary approach to further understanding of vegetation change under climate warming. She is interested in the interplay between ecology, remote sensing, modelling, and field validation. She holds the Faculty of Science Pro:NorthEast studentship in Biosciences aimed at retaining doctoral students of colour in the North East.

Outside of her degree she is also one of UK Polar Network’s EDI Officers (2022-24) and sits on the Diversity in Polar Science (DiPSI) national steering committee as well. This has involved running and attending several events such as co-chairing the UK Arctic Science Conference 2023 Inclusion and Community action session, being invited to the All Party Parliamentary Group Polar Pride event at Westminster, and running an event at Durham funded by the Durham EDI fund and Geography Department.

Millicent has an Masters by Research and BSc in Physical Geography from the Department of Geography at Durham University. She studied shrubs, machine learning, and remote sensing to differentiate between species contributing to shrubification of the Alaskan Sub-Arctic tundra. She spent a month on fieldwork in Alaska during summer 2022 which was funded by the Mount Everest Foundation, the Andrew Croft Memorial Fund, and the Weald of Kent Rotary Club. Her undergraduate dissertation focussed on looking at how farmer’s land management regimes were affected by differing subsidies to understand how land management techniques changed. Post-degree she spent 10 weeks interning at the Arnold Arboretum, she is the first and only person from Europe to have done so, in summer 2021 where she was introduced to polar ecology and shrubification.