Personal Statement
Becky Hopkins is a Research Project Technician on the NERC Project 'Palaeomagnetic field behaviour in the Palaeozoic and the hunt for inner core birth' in the Geomagnetism Laboratory. She completed her PhD at the University of Southampton in 2024 on 'Pleistocene – Recent reconstruction of Antarctic climate in the Amundsen Sea'. Her research generated new age models for the Plio-/Pleistocene section of International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Site U1533, including generating the longest Antarctic relative palaeointensity record to date, and characterised rock magnetic properties of discrete and u-channel samples to reconstruct past oceanographic and environmental changes. In addition, Becky sailed with the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) Thwaites Offshore Research (THOR) group to the Amundsen Sea Embayment in 2020, where she collected sediment samples for foraminifera stable isotope analysis. During her time at Liverpool, Becky will be generating absolute palaeointensity data from Cambrian samples in order to better constrain the Earth's magnetic field behaviour during this period of uncertainty.