French 'Cotutelle' now established at UTAS

A cotutelle PhD program has been established at UTAS with our first UTAS student, Heidi Pethybridge at the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies/ Antarctic Climate and Ecosystem CRC and the University of Bordeaux. Our first French student is Claire Maraldi from University of Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, who will be working with researchers from the UTAS-CSIRO Joint Quantitative Marine Science program and from IASOS/ACE CRC.

The Cotutelle program is a French national initiative which entails a PhD student being supervised jointly by academics at Australian and French universities. The PhD student spends time between the two countries and receives a joint, or double badged degree by the two institutes (two PhDs in one!).

Heidi Pethybridge’s PhD project is on the ‘Trophic ecology, reproductive investment and ecotoxicology of deep-sea sharks’. A significant goal of this project is to acquire data on important parameters that will be used in model simulations to test the effects of fishing pressure on these apex predators. As part of this she will investigate toxicity and bio-accumulation of total mercury and methyl mercury partitioned in major tissues within the body of these sharks. The multi-disciplinary approach of this project meant that she needed to be supervised by a team from IASOS (Drs Patti Virtue and George Jackson)– CSIRO (Drs Peter Nichols, Ed Butler and Ross Daley), University of Bordeaux (Professor Alain Boudou) and Département Biogéochimie et Ecotoxicologie IFREMER (Dr Daniel Cossa). Through this collaboration Heidi will have access to expertise of the supervisors involved and to state of the art instrumentation at both CSIRO and IFREMER.

Heidi also recently won a highly competitive international ‘University of the Sea’ award to participate in a marine science cruise aboard the French ice breaker ‘Marion Dufresne’. Along with 19 other postgraduate students from 9 Asian-Pacific countries Heidi assisted scientists from Geoscience Australia, IFREMER and the French Polar Institute in the study of marine geochemistry, paleo-climatology and oceanography. This opportunity enabled Heidi to experience first hand what conducting scientific research at sea entails. She also had some valuable lessons in international relations and an opportunity to practise her French!

Claire’s project involves modelling of ice shelf-ocean processes, focusing on the Amery Ice Shelf region, East Antarctica. Her research overlaps with a current IASOS PhD student, Ben Galton-Fenzi, whose project also involves looking at the dynamics of the ice/ocean boundary under ice shelves. Each group is developing independent models for the project - a three-dimensional high resolution hydrodynamic ocean model, with realistic melt/freeze rates at UTAS and a purely barotropic high resolution model at Toulouse. The use of the two different approaches and the inter-comparison of both models will help us to better understand the response of the Amery Ice-Shelf to ocean forcing. Results will lead to estimates for freshwater budgets and sea level rise under different climate change scenarios and improve the tide modelling and estimates of the energy dissipation under the ice-shelf. Both Claire and Ben are being supervised by Prof Richard Coleman and Dr John Hunter at UTAS and the French supervisors in Toulouse are Dr Laurent Testut and Dr Benoit Legrésy. Claire and Ben will present some of their early PhD results at the upcoming 2nd SCAR Open Science Conference “Antarctica in the Earth System” to be held in Hobart, July 12th – 14th 2006. After the SCAR meeting, Claire will stay at UTAS for two months to continue her research as part of the cotutelle program.