Dr Hayley Cawthra is a Chief Scientist at the Council for Geoscience (CGS) and a Research Associate at the Nelson Mandela University (NMU) African Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience.
At the CGS she has Designed and is Leading a newly initiated offshore mapping programme for South Africa. She completed an MSc from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) awarded with Cum Laude (2010), a PhD in Geological Science from the University of Cape Town (UCT) (2014) and conducted a post-doctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Bremen Centre for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) in Germany in 2016.
During the past five years, Dr Cawthra has been a Principal Investigator on two projects that have raised a total of ~R11 million in funding and all funds have been directed at research in South Africa. She works on projects as a Co-Principal Investigator sponsored by the NSF (x2), the German BMBF (1 past, 1 current) and the National Geographic Society (x2).
She continues to work on numerous ongoing multi-disciplinary research projects in South Africa with local and international collaborators from various disciplines, with the common interest of understanding global change. Her Research focuses on various aspects of Quaternary geology and glacio-eustatic sea-level change, with particular reference to submerged deposits on the continental shelf and she has spent more than 10 years refining methods to unravel seafloor geological deposits in a context of Pleistocene global change. Submerged landscapes, human origins and human use of ancient coastlines were the focus of her PhD work offshore of Mossel Bay and her current field sites are located on the Cape South Coast, the southwest coast of South Africa, and Pondoland on the Wild Coast.
Dr Cawthra has Led and been Involved in several marine geoscience expeditions and she has gained experience in offshore geological mapping of submerged outcrops by scuba diving, as well as onshore geological mapping. She has skills in the acquisition, processing and interpretation of marine geophysical data and is a Qualified Commercial Diver.
Dr Cawthra Serves on several professional committees and more substantive of these are holding the position of Chair of the South African Committee for Stratigraphy task group for Post-Karoo stratigraphy (2014-) and being a Member of the South African National Committee for the International Quaternary for Quaternary Research (2015-).
She has been a Steering Committee Member of the South African Extended Continental Shelf Claim Project since 2012 and a Technical Advisor on the South African delegation at the 21st-25th sessions of the International Seabed Authority (2015–2019) where she is Assisting in the development of a deep seabed mining code for international waters under the auspices of the United Nations.
Dr Cawthra is Author/Co-Author of 60 peer-reviewed journal articles and scholarly book chapters thus far and has also Assisted in Geo-Heritage art initiatives by Designing and Drawing etched prints for plaques in the Western Cape, helping towards exhibitions at the West Coast Fossil Park, !Khwa ttu and the Great Brak River Museum, and Made a geological trail in the Stilbaai Tuin op die Brak.
