Who is Cabot Insitute? Sophie Ross-Smith

Sophie Ross-Smith

In conversation with Sophie Ross-Smith, Manager at the Cabot Institute

What is your role at Cabot Institute?

I am the Manager for Cabot Institute for the Environment, responsible for the day-to-day running of the Cabot Institute, contributing to and delivering our strategy, supporting our community, and managing Cabot’s dedicated professional services team.

How long have you been part of Cabot?

I joined Cabot in March 2021 but have enjoyed collaborating with Cabot in my previous roles at the University, so super excited to have joined the Cabot team.

What is your background?

I studied Biological Sciences at Bristol and then went on to work at the University, where I’ve held numerous roles focusing on research and project management, bid development and partnership management. I have working in numerous disciplinary areas from aerodynamics to the future of our communication system to city scale experimentation. I have also managed some of our university key partnerships and keen to grow our partnership within Cabot. Having worked in lots of different areas, I have a great university network and passionate about bring people together to solve some of the most complex challenges we face today.

Why did you want to join the team?

I find working on interdisciplinary projects inspiring, rewarding and a continuous learning experience, coupled with Cabot’s focus on environmental research and our mission to ‘protect the environment and identifying better ways to live in our changing planet’, it was a team really wanted to join. To wake up every morning and know that what you are doing daily is making our planet a better place to live, is awesome!

What do you think is the biggest environmental challenge facing us today?

Climate change and the implementation of the changes we need to take to tackle our climate and ecological emergency. If you want to find out more about some of our biggest environmental challenges, check out our Cabot Conversations.

What is your favorite part of your job?

Ooh, not sure I can pick a favorite, but here are a few highlights: working with the fantastic Cabot team and Community, meeting passionate and inspiring Caboteers daily, the vibrant and can-do culture of Cabot meaning every day is different.

What are you most looking forward to over the next 10 years of Cabot?

We have an incredible community of over 600 experts, who are working across multiple boundaries to help solve complex environment issues. I am looking forward to continuing to support this community to grow from strength to strength and continuing to help people connect across the University. I think we have an exciting opportunity over the next 10 years to build upon our strong community foundations, to increase our profile and develop partnerships to amplify the impact of our research. Our pioneering Cabot Master’s by Research Programme, which spans across all faculties, is training our future leaders in global environmental challenges and I’m excited to see how can continue to develop and nurture talent through educational and development opportunities. I am looking forward to continuing to work with Guy and the rest of our senior leadership team, the Cabot team, our Co-theme leaders, and our wider community to realise our ambition goals.

Find out more about Sophie here.

Converting probabilities between time-intervals

This is the first in an irregular sequence of snippets about some of the slightly more technical aspects of uncertainty and risk assessment. If you have a slightly more technical question, then please email me and I will try to answer it with a snippet. Suppose that an event has a probability of 0.015 (or 1.5%) of happening at least once in the next five years. Then the probability of the event happening at least once in the next year is 0.015 / 5 = 0.003 (or 0.3%), and the probability of it happening at least once in the next 20 years is 0.015 * 4 = 0.06 (or 6%). Here is the rule for scaling probabilities to different time intervals: if both probabilities (the original one and the new one) are no larger than 0.1 (or 10%), then simply multiply the original probability by the ratio of the new time-interval to the original time-interval, to find the new probability. This rule is an approximation which breaks down if either of the probabilities is greater than 0.1. For exa...

1-in-200 year events

You often read or hear references to the ‘1-in-200 year event’, or ‘200-year event’, or ‘event with a return period of 200 years’. Other popular horizons are 1-in-30 years and 1-in-10,000 years. This term applies to hazards which can occur over a range of magnitudes, like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, space weather, and various hydro-meteorological hazards like floods, storms, hot or cold spells, and droughts. ‘1-in-200 years’ refers to a particular magnitude. In floods this might be represented as a contour on a map, showing an area that is inundated. If this contour is labelled as ‘1-in-200 years’ this means that the current rate of floods at least as large as this is 1/200 /yr, or 0.005 /yr. So if your house is inside the contour, there is currently a 0.005 (0.5%) chance of being flooded in the next year, and a 0.025 (2.5%) chance of being flooded in the next five years. The general definition is this: ‘1-in-200 year magnitude is x’ = ‘the current rate for eve...

A dirty relationship

I went to see Cabot Institute Artist in Residence Neville Gabie ’s Archiving Oil installation in the Basement Stores of Geology last night (16 May 2013). It’s pretty cool to be down in the depths of the Wills Memorial Building at the University of Bristol and I can safely assure you I saw no ghosts. I started off by going into a lift and as the doors opened into the basement, there was an eerie darkness with a bright light emanating from a creepy corner. A man dressed in white was in front of me and he was pouring a sticky black substance into buckets. A distinctly thick, gloopy and dirty sound filled my ears. I promise you it wasn’t a ghost but the image in front of me was quite harrowing. We use oil in everything we do and here was oil in its bare nakedness – black, shiny, thick, dirty. I stopped and stared for a while, mesmerised by the horribleness of the clean white background being splatted with this dirty substance. ...

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