Professor I. Nick McCave (1986)

Nick McCave has been a Fellow of St John’s since 1986. As he puts it he had been everywhere except Cambridge (Oxford, Ivy League, European research institute, ‘new’ University). He is Emeritus Woodwardian Professor of Geology in the Dept of Earth Sciences of which he was Head (1988-98). He comes from the island of Guernsey and became a classical (land-based) geologist at Oxford (MA) and Brown (USA) (PhD) Universities where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He started work at sea on North Sea sand deposits in the Netherlands as a NATO Research Fellow, was a founding member of the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, and for 10 years an Adjunct Scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (USA) by which time he had descended to muddy deposits of the deep sea. There his work has been on sediment transport and deposition of fine sediments. He has specialised in analysing properties of deep ocean sediments for understanding past behaviour of the ocean circulation/climate system in the Atlantic, southwestern Pacific, Southern and Indian Oceans. Honours include the Shepard Medal for Marine Geology (USA), Huntsman Award for Marine Science (Canada), Lyell Medal (Geological Society, London), a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship, and Fellowship of