Meet the Journal of Quaternary Science's Editor in Chief

Neil Roberts 

Neil is emeritus professor of Geography at the University of Plymouth and visiting research fellow in Archaeology at Oxford University. He completed his doctorate at University College London, followed by a post-doctoral post at Oxford as part of the COHMAP programme. He was lecturer at Loughborough University from 1981 to 1997, where he wrote the first edition of his book The Holocene (Wiley-Blackwell), now in its third edition (2013). His research interests focus on understanding the long-term, two-way relationship between people, climate and environment. They include: the analysis of lake sediment archives using diatom, stable isotope, pollen and charcoal analyses; climate changes at the end of the last ice age and how they affected the emergence of Neolithic farming; and the human transformation of land cover in Europe and the Mediterranean during the Holocene. Much of his work has been carried in close collaboration with archaeologists and historians.

Meet the Journal of Quaternary Science's Associate Editor for Asia and Australasia

Rewi Newnham 

Rewi is Professor of Physical Geography at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand) and an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, having formerly been Professor of Quaternary Science at University of Plymouth, UK. His research spans a broad spectrum of environmental change with a key focus on Late Quaternary vegetation and climate change, particularly in New Zealand, in the context of global change, past and present. Other aspects of environmental dynamics include determining sea level variability over the past few centuries, tracing the environmental and health impacts of past volcanism and investigating human-environment interaction in prehistory. He also has extensive experience in monitoring airborne pollen and contributing to public health research and understanding of biotic response to contemporary climate change. His research has been conducted mostly in New Zealand, but also in the United Kingdom, North America and Australia.

Meet the Journal of Quaternary Science's Associate Editor for the Americas

Nicholas Balascio

Nicholas is a professor of Geology at William & Mary, Virginia (USA). He completed his doctorate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, followed by a position as a Lamont Postdoctoral Fellow at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, New York. His research interests focus on reconstructing Holocene climate and environmental change primarily in Arctic regions. He has expertise in the analysis and interpretation of molecular biomarkers and the application of tephrochronology in distal environments. He has also worked to understand early human landscape impacts and long-term human-environment interactions at sites throughout the North Atlantic region. Recently, he has been developing records of Quaternary environmental change in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, and analyzing historic records of pollution and landscape change at sites in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. 

Meet the Journal of Quaternary Science's Associate Editor for Europe

Achim Brauer

Achim leads the Climate Dynamics and Landscape Evolution section at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences and is professor for Quaternary Geology at the University of Potsdam. His research interests focus on rapid climate change and its environmental impacts during the last glacial-interglacial cycle. Other fields of interest are the relation between extreme meteorological events and floods to Holocene climate change and anthropogenic landscape evolution, and lake monitoring in order to trace seasonal sedimentation dynamics. His main expertise is the analyses of varved lake sediments applying a combination of micro-facies analyses, high resolution element scanning and stable isotope analyses, including the development of age-depth models for lake sediment records. He has worked mainly in Europe, notably along a transect from the Baltic to the Alps and the Mediterranean.

Editors' Choice

Aspects of human physical and behavioural evolution during the last one million years
Julia Galway-Witham, James Cole and Chris Stringer

Cryptotephras: the revolution in correlation and precision dating
Siwan M. Davies

Late Quaternary meltwater pulses and sea level change
Stephan Harrison, David E. Smith, Neil Glasser

Summer precipitation for the England and Wales region, 1201–2000 CE, from stable oxygen isotopes in oak tree rings 
Neil J. Loader, Giles H. F. Young, Danny McCarroll, Darren Davies, Daniel Miles & Christopher Bronk Ramsey

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