Dr Roxane Andersen

Career history:

I graduated from a PhD in plant sciences in 2009 from Université Laval in Canada, where I was studying biogeochemical cycles and microbial community in boreal peatlands following restoration.

I worked as a PDRA at the James Hutton Institute until 2011, looking at responses of peatland microbial communities to disturbances, before joining the University of Waterloo also as a PDRA to look at microbial communities and biogeochemical cycles in peatlands in the Oil Sands regions of Canada, as part of a large NSERC consortium.

I moved to the Environmental Research Institute, part of the University of the Highlands and Islands in 2012 as a research fellow, where I developed and launched the Flow Country Research Hub, the network of researchers and stakeholders working in the Flow Country peatlands of Caithness and Sutherland. In 2014, I was promoted to Senior Research Fellow and was appointed as the ERI’s theme leader for our "Carbon, Water and Climate" research. My role is primarily research-focus and doesn’t include a large teaching contribution.

Within the UHI, I sit on the Research Degree Committee which oversees the delivery of our post-graduate programmes, on the Athena Swan Self-Assessment team which evaluates the UHI’s progress on diversity and equality issues and on the SUPER DTP panel.

Since 2012, I have been a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the International Peatland Society. In 2016, I was also invited to join Sctoland’s National Peatland Research and Monitoring Group, which I now chair. I also sit on the management board for Plantlife’s Munsary Peatland.