Interviewing for Biological Oceanographer

We are trying to hire people again! Which is good. Or maybe I should say ‘still’. Technically, we are just still continuing the round that involved job interviews last August. That roundhead resulted in a new bloke, Phil, who has actually started this month. Hooray! And the 1st of April we can expect the second appointee from that round, but she had to move intercontinentally, so that was a bit more faff. 

In a continuation of that round, there were job interviews planned early in the year. It is all dragging on quite a lot! And that is not new. But better late than never we snapped into action again. The first batch was for a position of biological oceanographer. And there were four candidates on the shortlist. One was local, and the others called in from various locations on the other side of the Atlantic. 

I was not on the panel, but I attended the presentations. They all came at the topic from a completely different angle, and we thought there was quite some difference in how promising their teaching was. The floor thought several candidates were appointable. That was a good sign.  

Ocean colour; a proxy for biological productivity. This pic by NASA came up in one of the example lectures 

Only two days later, an email came in from the Head of School. They had appointed someone in the post! Now that is great. And they had hired the local candidate: Martyn! That was good news. He did sterling job with his presentation. And I personally quite look forward to being his colleague. I suppose by now  we go quite a way back; eight years ago I attended his wedding! 

He will have to give a few months notice in his current job, and then he can start in this academic position. Excellent stuff. It does mean we now have four people called Martin/Martyn in the academic staff, and I thought three was already quite confusing, but experience tells us you can't have enough Martins/Martyns. So welcome to Martyn, and I hope that those in a position to do so make a similarly quick decision in the next post that the School was interviewing for: top predator ecologist. Watch this space!