Asso. Prof. Ian R. McDonald
I work at the University of Waikato and live in Hamilton, New Zealand. I am British and moved to work in New Zealand 6 years ago. During secondary school in the UK I was really turned on to science by a number of teachers especially Mr Siggsworth a Biology teacher. I then went to university to do a BSc Hons degree in Biology in Northern Ireland and then to the University of Liverpool for a PhD when I had an excellent supervisor Prof Alan McCarthy who really motivated me to get excited about research and to continue in research. It was also during my PhD that I became aquatinted with the study of extremophiles, with which I am now again involved. After over 10 years as a postdoctoral researcher and research Fellow at the University of Warwick I moved to New Zealand.
I have been to the Dry Valleys prior to this project studying bacterial diversity in a number of different projects. However during the 08/09 season I was part of the November team tasked with ensuring that the biology and geology of the three valleys we are studying was correctly mapped prior to the collection of samples in January. This season (09/10) I will be involved with setting up experiments to look at the activity of the microbial populations over an extended period this summer, we hope to find out more about which organisms are active during the Antarctic summer in the Dry Valleys and what their roles are in this extreme ecosystem. |
