The prestigious fellowship programme supports talented early-career researchers with the potential to become the next generation of leaders, supporting four years of ambitious research. Dr Lois Baker, Flora Philip Fellow, has been awarded a £1.3 million UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship to study turbulent mixing processes in the Arctic Ocean. The interdisciplinary 'Ocean in Flux' project will transform understanding of Arctic mixing processes and their impact on the climate system.Climate change is having a profound impact on the Arctic region, which is warming more quickly than anywhere else on Earth. As Arctic sea ice decreases, oceanic currents will accelerate, energising internal waves. Lois explains, "When internal waves break, the resulting turbulence effectively mixes together waters of different densities, potentially providing avenues for the warm, deep waters to reach the vulnerable sea ice and creating a positive feedback mechanism for sea ice melt"."Current climate models cannot resolve the small scales of the processes that generate turbulence, and therefore poorly represent their impact on the mixing of heat between the deep and surface Arctic Ocean, leading to important biases in the modelled ocean state".Lois and her team will develop a more accurate representation of turbulent mixing for climate models and assess how these processes could change as the Arctic continues to warm.Throughout the fellowship, she will be collaborating with partners at the National Oceanography Centre and the Universities of Cambridge, Southampton, and British Columbia in Canada, combining theoretical and numerical approaches, observational data, and innovative tools for data analysis of wave-resolving numerical simulations. Tags Staff success Sustainability This article was published on Thursday 24 September 2026
