Grants

Research funding: ~CHF 2’062’500 total

ERC Starting Grant

| 2026–31, PI, €1.5 million

Project: RECO-ECO: Reconstructing the Ecologies of Earth’s Earliest Arthropods

I was awarded a 2025 Starting Grant from the European Research Council to start my lab at the University of Geneva and fund my research for 5 years. My project will develop a comprehensive computational and experimental fluid dynamics regime to test key ecological hypotheses for the earliest arthropods in the fossil record.

Research Software Maintenance Fund grant, Institute of Research Software, UK

| 2026–28, Co-PI, £483’046

Project: Converting Users to Contributors: Enabling Sustainable Maintenance and Development of Palaeoverse

As Co-PI and part of the core palaeoverse team, we were awarded a software development grant to employ two full-time employees (Community Engagement Officer and Software Developer) to develop the long-term maintenance of the Palaeoverse suite of analytical R packages. We are also running regular international workshops to teach these R analyses and open science practices, and are running two mentoring cohorts on software development. I am line manager for the Community Engagement Officer.

BCUL open access funding

| 2025–26, Co-PI, CHF 10’000

Grant to support the development of the journal Open Palaeontology, including commissioning production of a new website and branding package.

Friedrich-Alexander-University PaleoSynthesis Project

| 2023–24, PI, CHF 20’000+

Workshop: TriBE Trilobite Biogeography and Ecology

Funding to organise and run a week-long international workshop for attendees from four continents. I was responsible for the entire workshop, including organisation and invitees, scientific direction, programme, and management. This established a working group of predominantly early career researchers to carry out long-term research on the early Palaeozoic global dispersal of trilobites.

Geological Society of London, Research Grant

| 2023, PI, £2010

Project: Ground truthing application of computational fluid dynamics to reconstruct extinct animal ecologies

Funding to set-up an experimental protocol using flume tanks to gather force data on extinct animals occupying different ecological niches. This data is being used to validate computational fluid dynamic simulations of the same, providing the first robust ground truthing work for these simulations.

University of Portsmouth, internal project funding

| 2023–24, Co-PI, £3000

Project: Experimental validation of fluid dynamic simulations for reconstructing extinct animal ecologies (to further develop the GSL grant above)

The Palaeontological Association, Research Grant

| 2023, Co-PI, £10’000

Project: Exceptional preservation in tropical settings: a glimpse into the Cretaceous of the equatorial Neotropics

Palaeontological and sedimentological field work of new Cretaceous sites in Colombia, with fully integrated research and teaching with local professionals and students to raise the profile of Global South palaeontology and develop ownership over palaeontological heritage.

Australian Bicentennial Scholarship, KCL Menzies Centre for Australian Studies

| 2017–18, PI, £4000

Project: Associations between trilobite intraspecific moulting variability and body proportions: Estaingia bilobata from the Cambrian Emu Bay Shale, Australia

EU Synthesys Project

| 2016–17, PI, £2000

Project: Post-embryonic development of Dalmanitina, and the evolution of facial suture fusion in Phacopina

University College Oxford Old Members’ Fund

| 2016 and 2017, PI, £1000

Elizabeth Hannah Jenkinson Fund, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford

| 2015–16, Co-PI, CHF 2000

Project: laboratory arthropod population and decay experimental studies, with application to the fossil record

NERC Doctoral Training Partnership, PhD studentship

| 2014–18, ~£130’000