
Dr Thomas Oliver studied at the University of Wollongong and completed Bachelor of Marine Science Advanced Honours (Class 1) supervised by Dr Kerrylee Rogers and Prof. Colin Woodroffe. He then completed a PhD under the supervision of Professor Colin Woodroffe reconstructing the depositional history of three prograded coastal barrier systems in southern NSW using OSL dating, Ground Penetrating Radar and airborne LiDAR. Dr Oliver continued and expanded this work as a post-doctoral research fellow at UOW before arriving at UNSW Canberra at the beginning of 2018 as a Lecturer in a teaching and research position. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2022.
Dr Oliver is interested in all aspects of coastal science spanning a range of time and space scales, from the late Quaternary to present-day processes, and from barrier and estuary evolution through to cyclic cut and fill of beaches by storms and estuary entrance behaviour. He has conducted research in many coastal locations around Australia including north Queensland, NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia. An overarching theme of his research is the application of our knowledge of sandy shoreline behaviour to coastal management in light of future coastal pressures. His research also involves the application of OSL dating to coastal sediments and he has led or co-authored publications that have contributed >350 OSL ages. This has furthered our understanding of the timing of coastal deposition and better constrained the age of key coastal landform features.
Research interests and potential PhD topics:
Honours project topics:
Recent Media:
Follow me on Twitter: @dr_tom_oliver
Local Government Contract, Bega Valley Shire Council - Understanding sediment movements within the lower Bega River estuary
Research Infrastructure Scheme: Real Time Kinematic (RTK) Global Positioning System (GPS) instruments for environmental geospatial research
My Research Supervision
Md Ashraful Islam - Recently completed.
Thesis topic: Assessing Resilience to a Tropical Cyclone in Coastal Bangladesh: a Synthesis of Geo-spatial Techniques and Social Responses
Gang Yang - Recently completed
Thesis topic: Modelling study on hydrodynamics and sediment dynamics in coastal areas: three case studies in Yalu River Estuary, Darwin Harbour and Batemans Bay in China and Australia
Le Anh
Thesis topic: Estimating tropical forest above-ground biomass at the local scale using multi-source space-borne remote sensing data
Sanzida Murshed
Thesis topic: ConDRI: A Systematic Approach towards Assessing Contemporary Disaster Risk in the Coastal Region of Bangladesh
My Teaching
I teach at UNSW Canberra contributing to subjects of the Geography major: