UCL colleagues pay tribute to Dr Katharine Giles

Dr Katharine Giles was tragically killed in a cycling accident on Monday 8 April. Here, her colleagues in UCL Earth Sciences pay tribute. It is with great sadness that we report that our talented friend and colleague, Dr Katharine Giles, died in a road traffic accident while cycling to work on the morning of Monday 8 April. Coming so soon after the accidental death of Katharine's own closest colleague, Professor Seymour Laxon, we are all left with a sense of the outrageous unfairness with which some of our best colleagues have been taken from us. Katharine had a bright future ahead of her. She graduated with a first class degree in Earth and Space Sciences from UCL, studied under Seymour for her PhD, and went on to forge her own career as a Research Fellow and most recently as a University Lecturer. After it had become clear that sea ice freeboard could be determined from satellite altimetry, Katharine performed some of the first ground-based experiments to show how the same observations could be accurately related to sea ice thickness.This led her to undertake field campaigns to characterise radar penetration into sea ice, both in the Arctic and the Antarctic, and to identify that, in 2007, sea ice thinning accompanied the then record Arctic sea ice minimum extent.