Professor Richard Skeffington
- Undergraduate teaching: biogeography and soils; team projects; air pollution - effects and control
- Supervises and advises on third year dissertations
- Postgraduate supervision
Areas of interest
- Measurement and modelling of climate change effects on water quality
- Measurement and modelling of catchment influences on water quality
- Novel analytical methods for water quality monitoring
- Scientific basis for environmental legislation
- Acidification and recovery from acidification
- Environmental effects of air pollutants
Research centres and groups
Environmental Science Research DivisionBackground
After his PhD, Richard worked on heavy metal uptake by plants and then reclamation of China clay waste at the Universities of London and Liverpool respectively, before joining the research arm of the then nationalised electricity industry in 1977.
He researched numerous aspects of the effects of electricity generation on the environment, but particularly the effects of acid rain on soils, forests and waters, becoming Head of Terrestrial Ecology in 1988.
After privatisation of the industry in 1991, he became internal biology consultant to National Power plc, and ran an industry-wide contract research programme on environmental effects. He left the industry in 2000 and joined the University on a contract basis, where he has worked on a number of research projects.
Currently he is working on REFRESH, an EU-funded programme involving 19 countries which aims to discover effective ways of mitigating the effects of climate change on freshwater ecosystems, and LIMPIDS, which aims to discover novel ways to monitor chemicals in freshwaters and explore the implications of the results for models of freshwater function.