**Please be advised this event has been cancelled due to our speaker’s inability to travel from the UK under quarantine measures to slow the transmission of COVID-19. We hope to feature Professor Mather in our program later in 2020.**

Volcanoes are spectacular natural phenomena. They have shaped our planet and have been key in creating and maintaining its habitability. However, they can also be deadly natural hazards and are implicated in some of the greatest environmental crises in Earth’s history, such as mass extinction events.

Earth has experienced volcanism since its beginnings and observing a volcanic eruption is a truly primeval experience. We see a great range of different types of volcanic activity on our present-day planet, but the geological record reveals that there are also styles of activity not yet seen in historical times.

Join UK volcanologist Professor Tamsin Mather, who will explore some of the hazards and environmental impacts of these different types of volcanic activity. She will answer questions like: How can volcanoes erupt in so many different ways? And what lessons can we learn sitting on the edge of an active volcano today that give us insights into some of the most profound global changes in geological history, including mass extinction events?

About the speaker

Professor Tamsin Mather is a volcanologist at the University of Oxford, UK where she has been on the faculty since 2006. She received Masters degrees in Chemistry and History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge and, after a year working in Germany and then Brussels doing a placement for the European Commission, she returned to Cambridge, completing a PhD on the atmospheric chemistry of volcanic plumes and their environmental effects in 2004.

Before joining Oxford she was seconded to the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, and a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow. She won a UNESCO/L’Oréal UK & Ireland Women in Science award in 2008, the Philip Leverhulme prize in 2010, was UK Mineralogical Society Distinguished Lecturer in 2015/16 and winner of the 2018 Rosalind Franklin Award from the Royal Society. She has spoken at numerous science and participated in several TV and radio programmes including BBC Radio 4’s Life Scientific and The Infinite Monkey Cage.

Professor Mather is visiting Australia as the 2020 Distinguished Lecturer in the School of Earth Atmosphere & Environment (SEAE) at Monash University. This is a joint presentation hosted by the Royal Society of Victoria and the SEAE.