I am joined today by my incredible geography and environmental science lecturer and dissertation supervisor, Emma Moffett! Emma is currently a lecturer in geography at King’s College London, but has previously worked with the University of California, Irvine and Imperial College London after obtaining her MSc and PhD from the University of Auckland. She specializes in the contamination and community structure of freshwater ecosystems, ecosystem function, and the ecosystem response to urbanization.
Starting at the beginning of your career, what made you interested in environmental science?
Emma: I always liked being outside in general. The high school I went to bordered a creek, so we used to have scientists come from the university nearby for stream days. My initial excitement started at that age. I always loved biology in high school and those two things combined enhanced it. I started university and loved ecology - ecology is where it’s at. It’s this big problem to solve. Then, I got an internship at Auckland Council as an undergraduate and we did freshwater, marine, and terrestrial ecology which cemented my path to doing freshwater ecology.
It’s funny that you ended up in freshwater when your initial exposure to environmental science began there!
Emma: I always found that freshwater is really understudied. There’s a bigger focus on terrestrial and marine. Freshwater is left behind a lot even though it’s super important to everyone’s well being and ecosystem function.
Did this push you into academic research because you felt freshwater was understudied? Or how did you end up in this career path?
Emma: I definitely had friends that were academic minded, so when I finished my degree I was interested in continuing on. It’s pretty standard to do a master’s especially if you’re a bit more academic focused and even a consultancy job now requires a master’s. Going down any kind of “Actually, I want to be a scientist” pathway required that and that drew me in. I got a scholarship working with the local government to do my master’s and that helped me get into it without debt which made the decision a lot easier. After my master’s I got a job as a senior freshwater ecologist at Auckland Council and I was stoked, but the job was kinda toothless. It was a lot of monitoring and seeing the damage, but I didn’t really feel like it had the power to enact change and the people who could were senior with PhDs. It became pretty clear, pretty fast that I had to spend years working my way up or get a PhD. I was able to get a scholarship for PhD for my master’s grades and I decided if I wanted to do something, I needed a PhD.
You mentioned monitoring trends, could you expand on what kind of research you've conducted while on your path to obtaining your postgraduate degrees?
Emma: For my master’s, I was working with Auckland Council. My topic was looking at nutrient limitation and urbanization, so how are nutrients processed in systems and how does this change as fresh water systems are urbanized. I looked at these rural to native to urban gradient systems of streams in two cities in New Zealand. I looked at microbial nutrient limitations. We put nutrient diffusing substrates into the water which microbes can grow on if they want that nutrient. If nothing grows, they already have a lot of that nutrient. We found that as streams become more urbanized, they get overloaded with nitrogen which washes into other streams and then the ocean which causes eutrophication. For my PhD, I swapped to looking at climate change and how organisms adapt to different climates. It involved phytoplankton, zooplankton, and fish and I was really interested in their physiological changes. We had a series of ponds in California and New Zealand with a gradient of temperature and a fast-reproducing introduced species. We could see how they adapted while locked into the pond system. We looked at metabolic rate, body size, nutrient excretion, diet and found lots of differences. In general, we saw that they lowered their metabolic rate to adapt to warmer climates, they’re getting smaller, they’re eating more and changing their diets.
That’s so interesting and I’m sure our future environmental scientists will be really interested in this work! So you’ve done all of this research and you mentioned your prior internship, were there any other jobs you were doing along the way?
Emma: First was the internship and I also got a job as a park ranger for one year at a local park. That was just a summer job and my first exposure to working outdoors; lots of hiking, fixing trails, dealing with the public, communicating about invasive plants. As soon as I got to postgraduate level, I worked as a TA.
Obviously now you’re working as a lecturer, how would you say you got to this position?
Emma: I finished my PhD and then got a postdoctoral job at University of California: Irvine. It was similar to my PhD, but looking at lakes in mountains. Instead of using a thermal gradient in ponds, we looked at zooplankton in an altitudinal gradient in lakes. During that three year postdoc, I looked for a job outside of America and decided to move to the UK. I came to the UK working for Imperial as a research associate for six months and then got this job. There’s not many jobs that pop up, so it took a year of looking before I landed this position.
Now that you have gotten to this position, what would you say a typical day looks like for you?
Emma: What I was doing before was pure research and now it’s a 40/40/20 split of teaching, research, and admin. In the semesters when I’m teaching, it’s fully teaching or admin and then as soon as it finishes, I try to fit in my research. I start my day answering emails. There are quite a lot that come through! Today I’m doing some coding, meeting with you, and then I’ve got tutorials. It depends on the day, some days are purely prepping for teaching. As a researcher, all I had to worry about was producing the paper and you can choose whenever to do work. Now, my schedule is a lot more dictated by teaching.
I’m so grateful that you have chosen to spend some of that day with me! That’s the end of my questions, but I have some that have been submitted by my fellow ifutures users. When it comes to your research, some users were interested in the effectiveness of urban planning to actually protect ecosystems or do you feel it's more about managing damage that has already been done?
Emma: Yeah, I’d say it’s more about managing. Urban ecosystems are usually changed past the tipping point and very unnatural. There are areas that are more natural like Highgate Wood, but we’re trying to manage the damage at this point. We’re trying to bring back biodiversity in any form.
Within those management systems, are there specific urban designs that you have seen be beneficial to urban freshwater ecosystems?
Emma: In terms of management and urban planning, the main issue in London is the amount of stuff going into the waterways. There’s lots of sediment with nutrients and direct discharge of sewage into the Thames. There are things that they are doing to manage the overflow, but I think it needs a bit of tidy-up to not allow the discharge to go into it. In New Zealand, a big issue is the fertilizer runoff from farms which also has a lot of nutrients. This can be managed by buffer strips before waterways to intercept flows and limiting the amount of fertilizers we use.
You’ve obviously conducted your research into these topics in a lot of different countries. Some users were wondering how this has affected you and your research?
Emma: It’s really easy to stay in one place and really build up your repertoire in a specialist way. There are people that go to King’s, get a PhD from King’s, and now work at King’s and have their systems fully set up. On the flipside, I know a little bit about New Zealand and California, nutrients, climate change, salinization, fish, zooplankton and I think that’s beneficial too. My interview pitch was that I can do big data meta analyses, I can do work in the field, I can do lab work - I’m more flexible and adaptable! In academia, they say it looks good to move around and I agree that it doesn’t look good to do the same thing constantly because you’re always supported by the same team and the question becomes whether you can stand on your own. Moving around shows great independence, but I have nothing against people who go back and work for the same places because their life can be a lot more simple. I don’t find it challenging that I have this background because I am more flexible and can connect all the disciplines I’ve had experience in. The most annoying thing is that I find everything exciting! I can’t do it all so I have to pick and choose what I find the most exciting. There’s no right answer if you should stay or move, but if you do your master’s and don’t love it, definitely move! I really liked my master’s, but it was more biogeochemical and I always liked ecology more, so I shifted to it.
You’re very excited about your research, but as you said before, you end up doing it all in your non-term time. Do you find this difficult to balance?
Emma: We get the summer, so it’s quite a long period of time. June, July, August we do our own stuff and have almost no contact with teaching. In the run up to summer, you need to have a plan because once summer hits you only have a few months and it’s too late to be ordering equipment or having the lab build sensors. You need to be more organized. It is not as flexible as a research associate, but it’s way more flexible in what you want to study.
To end this off, another user would like to know what you feel are the biggest challenges for young research getting into this field?
Emma: The barriers to me are often a bit more financial. If you have the discipline for a PhD, you can go for it and get a job. I was really lucky to get a stipend and get my fees paid for my PhD from the University of Auckland and I know that’s not the case in a lot of places. I’ve met a lot of people here who are paying their way through their PhD and I don’t know if I would have done that. In terms of academics, the issue is that there’s not tons of jobs, so you have to be flexible about where you work. It’s pretty hard to stay at your local university. Of course as more people get PhDs, the bar is always increasing for lectureship positions for what you come in with. What someone might have gotten a lectureship with 20 years ago is one or two publications straight from PhD with no postdocs and now the expectation is 2 or 3 years of postdoc work and 10 or more publications. The baseline is always shifting to be more competitive which is incredibly tough with ecology work because it’s so lengthy. Obviously, you don’t have to stay in academia. You can go into government or policy or consulting and also make a difference and I think all of that is really important!
I think it’s important that you can end up making change wherever you want which is a great not to end on! Thank you so much for joining me and contributing your voice to ifutures to inspire that change!