Author Archives: FloodSkinner

About FloodSkinner

I am a geoscience researcher, educator, and content creator specialising in water, computer models, and games.

Moving on… (Part 2): New Year, New Job

I am extraordinarily excited to tell you that I will be joining York St John University (YSJ) in the new year as a Lecturer of Geography! To be honest, it is my dream job.

When I left transport planning to start a PhD way back in 2009, my goal was to be a lecturer. It is the only job I have ever really wanted. When the role I now have was advertised, I threw everything I had at it – whether or not I was to be successful, I wanted to “leave nothing on the pitch”.

In part 1 of this blog, I looked back at what I had achieved at the EA, in this part I want to look forward to things I am most excited about.

Teaching

My new role will be predominantly teaching. I am anticipating doing a lot of it and being very busy. Honestly, I am looking forward to this. I’ve had the opportunity recently to develop and deliver a new module on river management for the third-year geographers at YSJ. The module mixed lectures, workshops, and field visits, and I made a lot of use of games throughout. It was practical, focussing on real-world applications, and I brought in those working in the sector to speak to the students. I just found it awesomely rewarding and when I am working with the students it just feels like that is where I am supposed to be.

It has become apparent to me in the last few years that my passion is for education – it how I have chosen to spend my free time. I want to teach. I want to learn how to do it better. I want to get very good at it. I want to explore new ways of doing it and write about it. What an opportunity this is to do that!

Research and being creative

As an EA employee you are a public servant. You have a very clear job role, fulfilling an important function but with little scope to work outside of your job description. There were only a few opportunities in my day job to keep up my creative practice and maintain my science communication skills. For example, I was faced with a choice of either dropping out of organising the Games for Geoscience session or staying involved but in my own free time and at my own cost. It was also important that my own personal work was entirely and clearly separate from my day job and created no conflicts of interest. Hence, I developed the GeoSkinner brand to give my creative practice a distinct home. Still, I always felt guilty about this, like I was being unfaithful to my job.

In my new role, this creative work is encouraged and can be part of my day job (although the concept of a ‘day’ job in academia can be a little woolly). I am really looking forward to bringing together the different strands of my work into one. Obviously, I need to get settled in, and manage my time, but here are some of things you might see me working on in the coming years:

NERC Embrace-Enviro: This project has been funded by NERC and is led by my colleagues at YSJ. It is working with migrant and refugee communities to help them access science training, experience, and careers. I will be part of the team delivering science communication training in early 2026.

Games for Geoscience: We are approaching ten years of the Games for Geoscience session at the European Geoscience Union General Assembly, including the Geoscience Games Night. My ambition is for it to transcend the session and develop into a community with year-round activity.

Adventures in Model Land: Inspired by tabletop roleplay games (TTRPG), Adventures in Model Land is an open-source framework to help modellers design explorable worlds based on numerical models. Recently, I took part in a Maths on the Move podcast about the project, you can listen here. I hope to bring some new energy to this project.

Play Your PhD: My imagination workshops, inspired by LEGO SERIOUS PLAY, are aimed at helping PhD students develop their imaginations as a useful skill. I’m really keen to develop an entire gamified programme of workshops equipping early career researchers with playful skills.

Hydrology Tea-Break: The majority of people who work with hydrology would not actually call themselves a hydrologist. Hydrology Tea-Break would use science communication as CPD aimed at those needing to follow multi-disciplinary T-shaped careers.

Models as Imagination Infrastructure: Imagination Infrastructures are things that help us think of and picture positive futures and change. Models can help us imagine the future but are often inaccessible and tend to focus on understanding impacts of disasters and worst-case scenarios. I’d like to explore the capacity of models to help us imagine alternative, more hopeful, futures. Games are a potential medium to help make such models more accessible.

I hope to provide regular updates on my work through this blog so please do subscribe using the box below – I’ll aim for monthly updates but this might fluctuate when I get busy!

If you’re interested in working together, either on one of the projects above or something else entirely, please do get in touch, I’d love to chat (c dot skinner at yorksj dot ac dot uk).

Views expressed in this newsletter are mine and do not represent those of my employer. Content and links are provided for informational purposes and do not constitute endorsements. I am not responsible for the content of external sites, which may have changed since this newsletter was produced

Moving on… (Part 1)

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I have news. I have a new job! So, it is with great sadness that at the end of December I will be leaving the Environment Agency (EA) after nearly five brilliant years.

Even though my new job is an extremely exciting opportunity – more on this in part 2 – I am sad to leave the EA as it is an important organisation that I am extremely fond of. Everybody I have met here has been supportive and 110% committed to their job and the mission of the business. Not least my wonderful team that I will miss massively. I will always be proud to have been a part of it.

I’m leaving the role of Senior Technical Adviser in Hydrology, part of the team delivering Flood Hydrology Improvements Programming (FHIP). Me and my fellow FHIPsters work at the science-policy-practice interface, which is the space where the latest science and research is translated into the everyday processes we use to make decisions – in our case, these are decisions to reduce and manage the risks of flooding. The FHIP is linked to the UK’s Flood Hydrology Roadmap, a community co-created plan to improve flood hydrology over a 25-year period to 2046(ish).

My job is to be the technical lead on projects in the programme alongside a project manager and a team of subject matter experts. I also act as a subject matter expert for projects led by my colleagues. These projects are either delivered in house by me and the team, or we commission them out to experts in consultancies. In the case of the latter, my role is to provide technical steer and review to ensure the product being delivered is what we need. Due to the broad remit of the FHIP, the nature of these projects varies a lot.

Reflecting on my 4.75 years at the EA and in the FHIP, I’ve been thinking about what my highlights, or the things I’m most proud of, are. Here are just some:

Open Methods in Operational Flood Hydrology report

Joining fresh from academia in 2021, wet behind the ears and full of naïve verve to disrupt the sector, I gladly took the lead on a project to look at the feasibility and benefits of applying open science principals to methods used in flood hydrology decision-making. The scientific literature loudly, and rightly, extols the virtues of open science, including in hydrology, supported by international organisations including UNESCO. Surely, this was a no brainer for the operational, decision-maker realm?

This project was one of those commissioned to a consultancy, and I really valued the collaborative relationship we built with them in its delivery. I learnt quickly that the evidence supporting open methods in research does not translate directly into the operational realm. Although there are many potential benefits, there were also some potential risks, but also a whole lot of questions that would need to be answered on the way.

Most of these questions still need to be addressed by the hydrological community. The purpose of the report was to facilitate this conversation by providing a vision and an evidence base to start from. The creative approach taken by the team reflected this and was a joy to be a part of – see the great video by artists and project partners Somewhere/Nowhere above.

The report is currently shared on the FHIP’s webpages.

UK’s Hydrology Skills and Satisfaction Survey

One of the actions required by the UK’s Flood Hydrology Roadmap was to create a baseline of skills across the hydrology community. This was one of the actions taken on by the FHIP and one of the areas where the FHIP directly contributed to the delivery of the Roadmap. I was the technical lead and it was also a project where the delivery was in-house.

Infogram saying "92% are keen to learn new skills in their role"

Working with the EA’s Market Research team, I designed a survey to evaluate the skills and satisfaction of the users of hydrology in the UK. I advertised it far and wide, doing webinars, posting on mailing lists, finding local authority special interest groups, and writing articles for magazines about roads. It was worth it as it attracted 286 responses, a return I was very pleased with.

I really enjoyed this project – partly because I got to be hands-on and deliver it myself, but mainly because I discovered a passion for skills and understanding what people need to develop. The project also revealed some important things about the users of hydrology, not least how the diversity of the hydrology work force is not representative of the UK population as a whole.

The Results and Technical reports for this project are currently shared on the FHIP’s webpages.

Environment Agency Summer Activities @ The Science Museum

I rarely got to fully stretch my science communication and creative interests and skills in my role in FHIP. However, the EA provides its employees lots of development opportunities and I had the chance to hone some leadership skills by being a joint project manager for the EA’s Summer Activities at the Science Museum.

Selfie of me in a blue Environment Agency hard hat and a red life jacket.

Starting in 2022, the EA have led a month of STEM learning activities at the Science Museum (yes, the huge one in Kensington). Each year it has grown in size and prominence, and in 2024 the activities were moved from a space at the back to Technicians: The David Sainsbury Gallery, overlooking the main entrance lobby. We increased from three to four weeks and had space to run four separate zones.

This was a truly challenging – somewhat bruising – task that threatened to implode on a number of occasions. However, I am so proud of what we achieved – training 120 volunteers, successfully delivering four separate activity zones for four weeks over the busy summer holidays, and facilitating conversations with 80,000 members of the public (as estimated by the Science Museum). Working with Dr Laura Hobbs of the Science Communication Unit at University of West England, our evaluation showed that the volunteers gained valuable skills and confidence from the experience (paper coming soon hopefully).

The organising team won the EA’s internally prodigious One Team Award at the Environment Agency Awards, and it was thoroughly deserved by everybody involved. Sadly, there was no trophy.

Personal Development

I have learned a tonne during my time on the FHIP: Lots about operational hydrology; plenty about decision-making and the ‘art of the possible’; and more than I ever wanted to know about charity governance. I also learned a lot about myself, including the realisation about three years ago that I am ADHD.

The EA is a truly supportive organisation – it says it looks after its people and in my experience, it means it. I had colleagues who felt empowered to talk openly about their experiences and challenges with their own neurotypes, and it was from hearing these that made me question my own experiences. The EA gave me the space and support to go on this journey – including accommodations, ADHD-specific coaching, and line managers who treated it with curiosity and care. It has helped me enormously. I don’t know if I would have discovered this about myself anywhere else and I doubt my experiences would have been as positive.

Part of me will always be #TeamEA and I hope to continue many of the relationships I have built there and beyond in my new role. To learn more about that, and the future of GeoSkinner, you’ll have to wait for part 2 – make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss it.

Inspiring Interactions – Simon Clark

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Simon Clark is one of the most successful science communicators on YouTube. His channel, @SimonClark, currently has over 644,000 subscribers and his videos regularly amass hundreds of thousands of views. Although his channel is now focussed on promoting climate literacy it started 15 years ago as a vlog about his experiences as a state-educated student attending University of Oxford. This was significant because Oxford and Cambridge have traditionally been a space for privately-educated students – even today where less than 7% of students are privately educated they make up 30% of student intake at these universities, and historically this has led to a disproportionate under-representation of state-educated citizens in important roles (e.g., 65% of senior judges are privately-educated). It’s clear that his representation of the state-educated voice in that arena resonated with many people.

What I have found inspiring about Simon is how he has managed re-invent and evolve his channel throughout his career. From that original vlog, through his time doing a PhD at the University of Exeter, to going full-time afterwards, and now focussing on climate literacy. He has adapted and grown with his audience whilst remaining true to himself and the content he wants to make and feels is important. Recently, he has been open about struggling with YouTube’s algorithm and the threat that poses to his livelihood – this led to another re-invention and the incorporation of some physical models into his videos. Simon makes these by hand and they are beautiful and he has been rewarded with millions of views. It’s imagination, it’s craft, and it’s realness – all the things I think people yearn for.

I’m also inspired by Simon as he is living my dream in many ways. He gets to be creative, share knowledge, and inspire people to learn every single day. He has already achieved my ambition and written a book (with an excellent audiobook version read by Simon himself). Like me, he’s a big gaming and Warhammer fan and successfully brings these into his work (seriously, check out his awesome Hawaiian Orks). When I put together videos for my YouTube channel, I looked to Simon’s for ideas – how can I put it together, how do I tell the story, how can I film this? Simon also co-hosted a brilliant podcast How to Make a Science Video with Sophie Ward where they chatted to other science creators. It is so jammed with useful insights and ideas that I highly recommend you listen if you want to make science videos.

I asked Simon some questions about imagination and his work.

Why is imagination important to the work you do?

Imagination is vital to me for two reasons. Firstly, YouTube is such a crowded marketplace that anyone not being imaginative in how they present their work risks being crowded by any number of content creators making things by the book. By making things that no one has ever made before, you stand out in a competitive niche. But more than that, and this is the second reason, it’s deeply fulfilling. I would never dream of referring to myself as an artist, but I think there is a part of me that clamours to express itself via art. Making videos is of course itself an art form, but trying to innovate and ask “what could I do here that’s unique” provides another level of artistic fulfilment.

How do you keep your imagination sharp?

I firmly believe that in order to create art you must consume art, and so I’m almost constantly hunting for new stimuli in the form of videos, podcasts, ideas, films, games, but particularly music. I’m one of those people who absolutely rinses their Spotify subscription. I think being exposed to new ideas in one medium – such as music – makes you question preconceptions and biases you have in other media forms. And doing that is the first step to creating something innovative. Which is the other key component – in order to create… you need to create! So I try to do something creative, whether that’s painting or singing or writing or videomaking, every day.

What are you currently working on that you would like to shout about?

I’m in the very early stages of a mammoth video that’s a sequel of sorts to my tiny Earth video. I can’t say much, but it’s going to be big in scale and involve very small models. And trains.

This post was originally published as part of the Imagination Engines newsletter. To get my content earlier and straight to your email subscribe using the box below:

Inspiring Interactions – Lucia Perez-Diaz

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Lucia Perez-Diaz is just simply multi-talented. You could describe her a Geoscientist. She has a PhD from Royal Holloway, has worked as a researcher, has an impressive scientific publication record and practices geoscience professionally. As an Earth Scientist, of the hard rock geology variety, Lucia specialises in understanding the process of plate tectonics, describing herself as a detective using clues and computer models to recreate the way the earth may have been in the long, distant past.

You could describe her as an artist, or even a science-artist. She is also a freelance illustrator and an incredible artist. She has a very distinctive and aesthetically pleasing style that she describes a “fun and whimsical”. Much of what she creates is made using papercut methods and even when her art is digital, whether that’s the beautiful illustrations for the game QUARTETnary or in her book How the Earth Works, it still carries that hand-crafted style. This is why her work appeals so much, it has a tactile quality, it looks like you could pick it up and run your fingers along the edges of each cut piece of paper – like a vinyl record, it is a medium that provides a direct connection between the audience and the creator.

Finally, you could also describe her as a writer and storyteller. She called herself a detective and in How the Earth Works she uses this as a device to draw the reader through the book. The book itself is aimed at children to inspire them with geoscience and learn about plate tectonics, but really it is her own story of investigating the deep past of the planet that she is inviting the reader to join her in. Recently, she has also turned her talents to science-journalism, joining the press team for the European Geoscience Union General Assembly, covering the themes of the conference including gender, AI, and ethics.

I asked Lucia a few questions about imagination and what it means to her work:

Why is imagination important to the work you do?

Much of what we do as Earth Scientists relies on imagination. We imagine processes we can’t directly see, and times we can’t travel to. Science, to me, is built on curiosity—and curiosity naturally leads us to create new ideas, to imagine. For me, science, imagination, and creativity are deeply intertwined.

As an artist, imagination plays the obvious role in the creative process, but also in figuring out how to communicate science in ways that resonate with people who may have different perspectives, interests, or relationships with it. It’s about finding new entry points into scientific ideas.

How do you keep your imagination sharp?

One thing I started doing a few years ago that really helps keep me creatively fit is taking on projects that are outside my comfort zone. Last year, for example, I created a series of illustrations featuring eight different characters based on various lipids.

“Take cholesterol and design a character inspired by its molecular structure and characteristics” — it doesn’t get much weirder than that! At times I regretted agreeing to it, but it pushed me to think in new ways, and I was really happy with the final result.

Some of these experiments never make it to social media — sometimes because I’m not allowed to share them, other times because they don’t fit my usual content — but they absolutely help keep my imagination active.

What are you currently working on that you would like to shout about?

Following my first book How the Earth Works, I’ve been developing ideas for new books — which I can’t talk about just yet, but I’m very excited about!

Alongside that, throughout 2024 and 2025, I’ve been working on a print series called Adventures in Time. It explores what it might be like to travel through different geologic periods. Right now, I’m working on a piece inviting travellers to the Paleogene—where you can climb Mount Everest while it’s still easy! (The Himalayas only began forming around 50 million years ago, so Earth’s tallest mountain was just a hill back then.)

This post was originally published as part of the Imagination Engines newsletter. To get my content earlier and straight to your email subscribe using the box below:

Introducing GeoSkinner

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I’ve changed my name! Well, my ‘brand’ and social media handle anyway.

I’ve been ‘FloodSkinner‘ since around 2015 after I change my Twitter handle from ‘CloudSkinner‘. CloudSkinner came about as my PhD was related to clouds and I made the switch as my first post-doc role was related to flooding.

After I left my last academic role and started using FloodSkinner as a catch-all for my personal projects, I considered using a different name. However, logistically it was challenging and my Twitter account had >4,000 followers at that point. I decided against it.

A few years down the line and I am increasingly unhappy with FloodSkinner as a name, or a brand, or whatever it is. It does not accurately capture my range of interests and the things I create and work on.

An example – just 8 out of my 23 YouTube videos on my main channel are about flooding. Just 4 of my 30 Shorts have a flooding theme.

Ultimately, I’ve just had the feeling that the name was inhibiting the growth of my content.

The new brand I am using is GeoSkinner – I am a geographer and a geoscientist, so Geo was the natural choice. I feel it is a much better fit and pretty much all my videos and Shorts feel relevant to the name.

To make the change, I’ve had to: update my logo; change handles on the LinkedIn page, BlueSky, LinkTree, Ko-Fi, and Discord; purchase a new website domain and add it to my website; and update profile pictures all over the place. My Instagram and Threads stay as GeoGamesMaster as GeoSkinner was already taken there.

One things I haven’t done yet is extract my FloodSkinner email account from the places I’ve used it and transfer over to a GeoSkinner one – this is being a bit tricky.

The final thing I’ve done is update my YouTube channels, including rebranding the existing main and Extra Life channels as GeoSkinner.

My 360 videos have never done well on the main channel, they get views but people stop watching very quickly – I guess if you’re pushed a 360 video you are not expecting, you won’t stay long. I’ve started a GeoSkinner 360 channel and moved my existing 360 videos onto it. I also took the chance to collate and upload my previous 360 content onto this one channel.

I feel very happy about the change and hope it makes a positive difference. In the three days before I switched domains this website had 24 views and 81 in the three days after. Now it’s time to make some higher quality content!