DrSara Benetti

Dr Sara Benetti is Senior Lecturer in Environmental Change at Ulster University (Northern Ireland), specialized in marine geosciences. She has gained experience in marine research through her work at the National Oceanography Centre (UK), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (USA), Bedford Institute of Oceanography (Canada), British Antarctic Survey (UK) and the Advanced Mapping Section at the Marine Institute of Ireland. She is involved in several Europe-wide research collaborations, funded at European and UK level, with emphasis on the reconstruction of the extent and dynamics of the British-Irish Ice Sheet (BIIS) using geophysical and sedimentological datasets (BRITICE-CHRONO and GLANAM). For this research, she also succeeded in securing funding and acting as chief scientist or co-investigator on over ten research cruises, as well as on other collaborative projects from NERC, the Irish National Development Plan, and the EU’s EUROFLEETS2, Marie Curie ITN, and Interreg NPA programmes.
She is an expert evaluator for the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research and the European Commission of a range on programmes including H2020 and Horizon Europe 2021 and a reviewer for some of the leading journals in the relevant fields of research.
She is Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and, as Head of School of Geography and Environmental Sciences, at Ulster University she had lead the development of two new programmes (BSc in Marine Science and MSc in Remote Sensing and GIS), and secured £1.2M for strategic development of the Centre for Environmental Spatial Data Analytics from the NI Department of Economy.