I’m not going to give too much away – it’s most likely that if you have come here deliberately you know who I am already and if you have come by accident you won’t really care.
In my professional life I am an Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in Ocean Science in the School of Biological and Marine Sciences at the University of Plymouth (UK). You can read my “Personal Professional Page” for more details on my work. I was born in Gloucestershire in 1965 (you can do the maths yourself), brought up in Somerset, and went to university in Oxford and then Bangor (Wales). I studied physics, then physical oceanography, my interest in the latter being triggered when a friend told me her father had studied physics at Oxford and he was an oceanographer and I thought “I could do that”. It was a way of continuing with physics but on a scale that you can observe with your own eyes and it was also appealling to be involved with a subject that is all about the natural environment. Now, I don’t only teach oceanography but also meteorology and, if I am honest, I find the latter more interesting. I think this is because we live in the atmosphere and so we experience meteorology on a daily basis. If I was a dolphin then perhaps I would feel the same way about oceanography but, obviously, I am not a dolphin (I have sometimes thought that those last five words would make a good title for my autobiography, if I ever get round to writing one).
In the past I have been a professional musician (of sorts – I played banjo in a Trad Jazz Band called Dixie Dilemma when I was living in north Wales) and a sports journalist (of sorts – I wrote the official match reports for the Plymouth Argyle website for a couple of seasons). I am married with two daughters (who have now left home), live in Plymouth and am a regular at Home Park (the home of Plymouth Argyle Football Club). Back in 2013 I took up running and it has now become something of an obsession. I read lots (and lots) and a few years ago I made a resolution to watch more films. I am also strangely addicted to exploring ways to organise my life, work efficiently, be motivated etc., something which probably makes me a bit weird.
That’ll do -what else did you want to know anyway?
Tim O’Hare, October 2023
Tim O'Hare 