Marian Yallop
Professor in Aquatic Microbial Ecology
Marian carried out her undergraduate degree at Royal Holloway College, London University. Her interest in freshwater biology developed under the tutelage of Dr John Evans and Dr Nan Duncan at Royal Holloway College, London University. One 24 hr undergraduate research project on the River Thames and she was hooked, and she her interest in algae has continued to this day.
During her PhD, she carried out research on the control of phytoplankton blooms on Thames Valley Reservoirs. The ubiquity of algae has enabled her to carry out research in many parts of the world. She is interested not only in the organisms that are present but how they respond to various pressures. She has worked in Bangladesh to investigate the use of cyanobacteria to fertilise deep-water rice fields, to Lake Ontario in Canada working on a pollution abatement programme, and to the ice sheets of Greenland where she rediscovered the presence of long- forgotten algal blooms that may promote ice-melt.
Closer to home she has carried out collaborations with a number of water companies, NGO’s and agencies including Wessex Water, Welsh Water, The Invertebrate Conservation Trust (Buglife), the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, the Freshwater Habitats Trust, Syngenta, the Environment Agency and English Nature. She is passionate about diatoms and this group has been a focus for much of her research work. She began her research at Bristol working on the role of intertidal microphytobenthos on mud-flat stabilisation in collaboration with academics in the Netherlands and Germany. She also worked on the development of tools using benthic diatoms to assess the ecological status of rivers and lakes across the UK in compliance with WFD legislation. More recently, she has focussed on eco-toxicology and the impacts of selected pressures including herbicides and metal nanoparticles on the growth of river phytoplankton and phytobenthos.
Currently she is a Professor in Aquatic Microbial Ecology in the School of Biological Sciences at Bristol University. Over the past thirty years, she has taught thousands of undergraduate students about the important role played by algae and cyanobacteria on our planet. She has also supervised many MSc and PhD students, a number of whom have subsequently continued to work in the research field.
