Overview

A cross-disciplinary postdoctoral researcher, I reconstruct air pollution histories for urban landscapes using pond sediments, pioneer biomedical tools for innovative digital environmental monitoring, and contribute to an industrially funded biofuels project.  

Urban air pollution: I have demonstrated how air pollution has evolved in the urban UK landscape since the Industrial Revolution, with progressive shifts in industry, urbanisation and industrialisation. I have shown air pollution signals captured by urban ponds in the heavily industrialised Mersey Region of NW England showed that air pollution has become smaller and potentially more toxic post-1980 due to a rise in combustion-derived particles from road, and air travel. These records extend our knowledge of pollution to before the nation-wide PM pollution monitoring network system and disputes the common perception that air quality has improved since the smogs of the mid-20th century.  I've also reconstructed air pollution trends from Chinese megacities and the novelty of this work was recently covered by The Guardian. 

Digital environmental monitoring using Imaging flow cytometry (IFC): I have spearheaded the novel application of IFC, a digital biomedical technology from cell research, to the digital monitoring of environmental indicators including bacteria, pollen, microplastics, phytoplankton in ice cores and coccolithophores. I have developed a bespoke deep learning network (Guided Deep Learning), in collaboration with Swansea University, that can accurately classify digital images of pollen in complex, ‘real world’ environmental samples.

Biofuels Research: I have developed a novel method to track the performance of engineered bacteria in solid state biomass using to inform the optimisation of industrial biofuels research.

Qualifications

PhD (2011) - Edge Hill University

BSc Environmental Science (2004) - University of Wolverhampton

Links

• DrAnnPower on Twitter

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Publications

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