Claire studied Geology at Royal Holloway University of London and graduated in 2000 (BSc first class honours) receiving several academic awards for her undergraduate work. She was awarded a NERC scholarship to study for an MSc in Micropalaeontology at University College London (graduating in 2001) and completed her PhD at Royal Holloway University of London (RHUL) in 2005 (receiving NERC and CASE scholarships in collaboration with The Royal Botanic Gardens,
Kew
). Her PhD research assessed the evidence for extensive wildfires at the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary; she was awarded The Palaeontological Association Annual Meetings President’s Prize in 2004 and her work has received notable media attention, featuring in BBC Horizon’s “What Really Killed the Dinosaurs” and on the Discovery Channel. Claire now holds an EU Marie Curie Post Doctoral Fellowship at University College Dublin.
Claire’s research interests include: mass extinction events, fire ecology, accuracy of fossil charcoal as an indicator of palaeowildfire, charcoal characteristics and taphonomy, biogeochemical cycling and ancient atmospheres with particular interest in using wildfire as a proxy for atmospheric oxygen.
