Dr Margi Bohm
Assistant Professor in Atmospheric Sciences
President, ACT Branch, Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
Course Convenor for B. Environmental Science
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University of Canberra Building 3, Room A5B - [Campus Map] Phone: (02) 6201 2058 |
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Education
PhD, Australian National University. 2000.
MSc University of Cape Town, South Africa. 1985.
BSc Hons. University of Natal – Durban, South Africa. 1981.
BSc University of Natal – Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. 1980.
Prizes and Awards
Carrick Institute for Learning and Teaching Citation (2007)
Vice Chancellor’s Distinction Award for Learning and Teaching (2007)
Vice Chancellor’s Award for Innovative and Creative Teaching (2003)
Research and Professional Interests
Margi is mainly interested in integrating across disciplines, space and time scales. She also strongly believes that the influence of scientific discovery is greatly reduced if buried in discipline specific journals. Thus, she works across a variety of communication lines, from newspaper and local community interest magazines to discipline specific journals:
Recent examples of community-based research include (a) ensuring that public policy is based on the correct interpretation of the science; (b) development of a learning centre based on neurological research into learning patterns in humans and learning through research following the post-graduate model of education in science; (c) dissemination of complex fluid dynamic principles to sport coaches.
Most of my recent discipline specific research activity has been in forest and agricultural meteorology looking at quantifying the physical processes controlling the flows of materials between the atmosphere and living organisms particularly plants. I am trying to untangle the fundamental physics of turbulent transfer within and immediately above rough landscapes such as crops, forests and cities. I am particularly interested in the relationships between momentum and scalar transfer on coherent structures within the turbulence and how to best express this in models that run at a variety of different space and time scales. Applications of this work include (a) understanding environmental factors that control transport and deposition of materials in the atmosphere to living organisms, specifically in plants (linking plant physiology with abiotic factors); air pollutants, greenhouse gases, heat and water vapour; (b) linking these to biological factors obtain a holistic understanding of processes controlling air pollution uptake with the aim of developing pro-active standards for the protection of living organisms from human influence; (c) developing biologically meaningful statistics that allow integration of large data sets in models (both for regulation and research) with little or no loss of the physics and biology information.
Teaching Interests
Integrating teaching and learning with professional practise is a focus for Margi. She defines professional practise in a Faculty of Science as undertaking scientific investigation towards discovery of new information and development of new ideas. Our students are the Newton’s of tomorrow and we need to equip them with learning skills that allow them to think outside of current paradigms if we expect them to push the frontiers of science in the future. Over the last decade, Margi has developed an inquiry based approach to teaching following neurological research on how we learn and applying that to the post-graduate research model of science learning. She works closely with her tutors and with the Science Resource Centre’s mentors to ensure that our students are exposed to professional practise through their learning. She has extended her ideas to sports coaching through developing a system that teaches athletes a heightened sense of practise thereby allowing them to adjust technique in situ.
Recent Publications
Haverd, V., M. Böhm, and M.R. Raupach (2010). The effect of source distribution on bulk scalar transfer between a rough land surface and the atmosphere. Boundary Layer Meteorology 135:351-368.
Donald, A., M. Böhm and I. Moore (2009). Changing how science students think: An Inquiry Based Approach. The International Journal of Learning 16:579-584.