Dr Andy Revill

In 1992 Andy completed a PhD at Plymouth University, UK, looking at the "Characterisation of Unresolved Complex Mixtures of Hydrocarbons” and was appointed as a Postdoctoral Fellow by the then CSIRO Division of Oceanography to investigate the organic geochemistry of the Tasmanite oil shale and a wider assessment of the petroleum prospectivity of Tasmania.
In 1994 he was appointed as a Research Scientist and Leader of the Biomarkers and Hydrocarbons Project. He has since worked on petroleum source rocks in Tasmania, fingerprinting hydrocarbons in Port Phillip Bay. His research interests included the fingerprinting of hydrocarbon mixtures found in the environment, the origins of certain "biomarker" compounds in oils and the use of stable isotopes in environmental research. Between 1994 and 1998 he was the leader of a program looking at the persistence of oil from the Iron Baron oil spill in Northern Tasmania. In addition he has been involved in major reviews of the possible environmental impacts of the oil and gas industry (APPEA, 1994) and contaminants on Australia’s North West Shelf (NWSJEMS, 2004). Recently he was part of a CSIRO team involved in real time tracking of the Deep Water Horizon oil spill.

He has 15 years’ experience in Organic biogeochemistry primarily focusing on understanding the sources and fate of carbon and nitrogen in estuaries using a variety of lipid marker and stable isotope techniques, particularly the combination of both and has been involved with major research projects investigating the Huon river estuary (TAS), Fitzroy river estuary (Qld), the Lower Ord river (WA) and the Kimberley. He is actively supervising biogeochemistry PhD students and has collaborative projects with researchers at several universities and other research institutions. Current projects include using compound specific nitrogen isotopes of amino acids to investigate diet shifts in marine ecosystems due to climate change and to model nitrogen turnover in marine predators. He is using compound specific isotopes of various biomarkers to distinguish carbon and nitrogen sources in estuaries and to determine the importance of these in estuarine and coastal food webs.