Lloyd Peck is a marine biologist who specialises in the polar regions. His main interests are in understanding the differences in the physiology and cellular biology of life at low temperatures compared with warmer regions. He carries this through to understanding how species respond to climate change, and how ecologies and life histories are affected by ice loss and catastrophic ice scour. Lloyd showed that low temperature gigantism is linked to oxygen availability, that ocean productivity increases greatly when ice shelves are lost, that embryonic development in species living near 0°C is an order of magnitude slower than it should be, even for the low temperature, and that this developmental slowing is related to problems making functional proteins at near freezing temperatures. He has over 850 Antarctic scuba dives.
Lloyd gave the Royal Institution Christmas lectures in 2004, was awarded a Polar Medal in 2009 and the PLYMSEF Silver Medal for outstanding marine biology in 2015. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge.
Professional position
- Science Leader, British Antarctic Survey
Subject groups
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Multicellular Organisms
Animal (especially mammalian) and human physiology and anatomy (non-clinical), Physiology incl biophysics of cells (non-clinical)
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Patterns in Populations
Ecology (incl behavioural ecology), Environmental biology, Evolution, Organismal animal biology including invertebrate and vertebrate zoology
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Other
Public engagement, Science education at secondary level, Science policy
