Profile

I’m in my early 40s, have a wife and two young children, live in York and work at the Environment department at the University of York. We moved here recently from Reading where I worked in the Geography and Environmental Science department. I’m a keen musician and like climbing mountains.

Work wise I try and find out how the environment works. In the past I’ve worked on acid rain and contaminated soil. At the moment I do a lot of work with earthworms. The underlying theme of my work is to try and use chemistry, biology and physics to understand how our planet works and the environment functions. You can read more about my research on my website at https://sites.google.com/a/york.ac.uk/mark-hodson/

The work I did on acid rain investigated how much acid rain could land on soil before the soil was damaged. When acid rain lands on soil the acid is neutralised when it reacts with minerals (ground up rock) in the soil. If the minerals react fast enough the soil isn’t damaged by the acid rain. So I spent three years working out how quickly minerals react in soils and therefore how much acid rain could happen before the environment was damaged. These ideas (not my work) are the basis for international legislation on acid rain and are a great example of how science influences politics. The photo shows an area known as “The black triangle“. It is at the borders of the former East Germany, former Czechoslovakia and Poland. The acid rain there was very bad due to the high sulphur content of the coal they used and burnt the leaves off the trees.

The contaminated land work focussed on how to clean up poisoned soil so that it could be used again. At the moment, most soil that is contaminated by accidents or former industry is landfilled – they call it dig and dump in the industry. This isn’t very sustainable so we investigated ways of changing the soil chemistry so that the poisonous metals were no longer poisonous. We did this by adding stuff (ground up cow bones!) to the soil which reacted with the metals to form insoluble, inert compounds. It works well in the lab. but it is still so cheap to dig up contaminated soil and throw it away that currently it isn’t being used commercially.

The contaminated land work led on to working with earthworms, initially using earthworms to assess whether land was poisonous or not – do earthworms live there or not but later on doing all sorts of stuff. At some of our contaminated soils we found weird looking earthworms so we did some work on their evolution and survival in poisonous soils.  The photo shows some earthworms I’ve worked on with Pete Kille and John Morgan from Cardiff University and Jane Andre, now at Lancaster, it’s easy to spot the mutant earthworm! I’ve also started doing some work on earthworm poo – they secrete balls of calcium carbonate that we can potentially use to determine the temperature of the planet in the past and therefore test climate change models – and looking to see whether earthworms increase or reduce the amount of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane) that comes out of soils.

Here’s an image of one of the balls of calcium carbonate that earthworms produce in their poo. It’s about 2 mm in diameter. Think about the diameter of an earthworm then scale them both up to human size – a painful thought!

The joy of my job is that really and truly there’s no such thing as a typical day. As a scientist employed as a lecturer at a University my work has three interrelated strands: teaching, research and admin. So my days are filled with:

1)  teaching students in lectures, practical classes, tutorials and seminars,

2) helping my research students and research assistants do research (and occasionally getting into the laboratory myself- as a fairly senior member of staff I have less time to play in the lab. than I used to which is not so good but the flip side is that I get involved in a wide range of research working with my students and research assistants, planning experiments and helping them interpret their results).

3) carrying out various administrative tasks necessary to help the department run, for example discussing with colleagues what we should teach, inviting guest lecturers to visit, discussing whether we should buy new equipment for the laboratories.

So as an example today I spent some time designing some experiments with a research student to investigate using magnetic nanoparticles to extract toxic metals out of soils, I spent some time marking student course work, I spent some time at a seminar hearing about a new computer model someone has developed to see whether the UKs declining bat population is due to bats eating insects that in turn have fed on metal contaminated soil, some time with another student working out why their experimental results didn’t make sense (we found out – they’d made a mistake in some of their sums) and some time trying to persuade someone to give me some money to do experiments to work out whether earthworms are killed during droughts.

Another typical day I’ve spent time with a student discussing how to work out the size of particles in soil, some time chasing a delivery company who have left some lab equipment that we need for an experiment at the wrong address, some time discussing public lectures that we could put on at the University and (yet more) time trying to get people to give me money to do experiments on earthworms and droughts.

Everynow and again I fill in a blog (http://darwinsplough.blogspot.co.uk/) describing what we’ve been up to but this is usually only when there is something exciting / photo worthy to report.