Co-Directors
Lyell Centre
Dr Tracy Shimmield is Co-Director of the Lyell Centre. Previously she was Associate Director of research institute the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) and Managing Director of their trading subsidiary SRSL (SAMS Research Services Limited), Oban, UK.
Tracy, a marine geochemist, has over 30 years’ experience in environmental geochemistry. She obtained an MSc From Strathclyde University and a Ph.D. from Edinburgh University. Her research interests include the investigation and assessment of human impacts on the marine environment through the monitoring of pollutants and the study of biogeochemical processes involved in their redistribution. She is also an experienced radiochemist and utilises natural and manmade radionuclides as tracers of marine processes including sediment accumulation and mixing rates.
Dr Shimmield has been supervisor to 9 PhD students and has been a Principal Investigator on a number of research and commercial grants funded by the UK Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC), European Union Framework programme and commercial companies.
Dr Shimmield is interested in how science and innovation can come together to realise societal benefit and economic growth. She is a member of the Scotland Can Do Forum set up by the Scotland’s Deputy First Minister.
As a marine biogoechemist, Dr Shimmield began working with the government of Papua New Guinea a decade ago, advising on mitigating and managing the impacts of mining on their marine environment, including the writing of ‘General’ and ‘Specific’ regulatory guidelines for the use of Deep Sea Tailings Placement (DSTP) in the country. As part of this project, Dr Shimmield organised and participated in an International Conference on Deep Sea Tailings Placement, held in Madang, Papua New Guinea (2008).
Over the years, Dr Shimmield has become a world-renowned expert in the environmental impacts of DSTP and was consequently invited to be a speaker at the Deep Sea Mining Summit held in London in May 2017. She has since travelled to Brussels to take part in a workshop on Technological and Environmental Aspects of Deep-Sea Mining and has presented to the Norwegian Mineral Waste Committee under the Norwegian Mining and Quarrying Industries (Norsk Bergindustri), and at the International Mineral Processing Congress held in Santiago, Chile.