John Bacon

I first arrived at UEA in 1996 as a mature student and took a B.Sc. in Geophysical Sciences, having had a 20 year long, and very enjoyable career as a Civil Engineer. But, nothing was quite the same and I returned to UEA in 2001, to research for a PhD in Coastal Processes with Professor Chris Vincent. I completed in 2004 and along with teaching sedimentology I also worked as a post-doc on the LEACOAST2 project, examining the decadal scale effects of major shore parallel breakwater installations on the North Norfolk coast. I moved to UEA based meteorolgy company Weatherquest from 2007 to 2010.

I joined Cefas in 2010, as an ecosystem modeller and now lead Cefas’ Ocean Processes and Systems group – leading the group's research and operations in hydrodynamic and geomorphological modelling, oceanographic, benthic and seabed interactions and processes. This post is partly managerial, but my scientific interest remains with geomorpoholgy and numerical modelling of waves, tides and sediment transport processes. At Cefas I introduced the Telemac and DELFT3D modelling systems and their high resolution capability in finite element modelling of all coastal physical and water quality processes.

I work at UEA for one day a week to help develop relationships and collaborations between UEA and Cefas scientists. This has led to projects on the coastal response to the 2013 storm surge and research into understanding and modelling deep sea oil release on the UK shelf break.

I have also led the collaboration between UEA Research Computing (HPC) and Cefas scientists who are deploying ocean models used at Cefas on Grace HPC at UEA.