Maynooth University Faculty of Social Sciences

Prior to 2008 he was a managing director/self-employed business person running several different companies for over 18 years. He began his undergraduate studies in Geography and Spanish as a mature student in the National University of Ireland, Maynooth in September 2008. Continuing his studies, he undertook a Msc in climate change and graduating in 2012. He then went to complete his PhD in October 2016 in the area of historical climatology. His thesis was entitled “Development and analysis of a homogeneous long-term precipitation network (1850-2015) and assessment of historic droughts for the island of Ireland”. He has been a lead author or co-author on several peer reviewed published papers in the field of historical climatology which focused upon data rescue, data homogenisation and quality control methods. His work also looked at past extremes such as droughts and their socio-economic impacts. During his PhD he also work part-time as a researcher at the Centre for Health Geoinformatics in Maynooth University, on a Health Research Board Project. On completion of his PhD he was employed as a research fellow on another health-related project with the School of Dental Science Trinity College Dublin in collaboration with the Centre for Health Geoinformatics. He now works as a senior postdoctoral researcher for the Irish Climate Analysis and Research Units (ICARUS) on a Copernicus funded project in conjunction with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF). He is one of the work package leads on the project which aims to compile a comprehensive global set of climate data holdings, of known provenance, integrated across both climate variables and timescales. The project is also working closely with climate data rescue efforts to ensure that all new unique data is processed into the database.