Mike Barnsley
This is one of the saddest and hardest things I’ve ever had to write, so please bear with me. It’s been more than a month of effort so far, and this is as far as I’ve got…
Back in early December, we received word that Mike Barnsley, Research Professor and Pro-VC at Swansea University, was seriously ill in hospital. Mike passed away on December 6th 2007.
From the Swansea Press Release:
Professor Barnsley studied Human and Physical Geography at the University of Reading, obtaining First Class Honours, where he also obtained a PhD in Remote Sensing of Vegetation and Soils.His first academic appointment was a `New Blood’ Lectureship in Remote Sensing and Geographical Information Systems (GIS), which was held jointly between University College and Birkbeck College, University of London. In 1989, he moved to a full-time post in the Department of Geography at UCL.
Mike Barnsley was appointed as Research Professor of Remote Sensing and GIS at Swansea University in 1995, becoming Head of the Department of Geography in 2002 and Head of the School of the Environment in 2005. Between 2003 and 2005, he was also the first Director of the Climate and Land-Surface Systems Interaction Centre (CLASSIC), one of the Natural Environment Research Council’s (NERC) six Centres of Excellence in Earth Observation, with which he remains closely involved. Professor Barnsley is currently a member of the Geography sub-panel for the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. In recent years, he has also been a member of NERC’s Peer Review Panel, the UK national committee of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, the Ordnance Survey’s Science and Technology Advisory Group and the British National Space Centre’s Earth Observation Programme Board.
He recently was involved as land science team leader on a European Space Agency small satellite mission, known as PROBA/CHRIS, and had also been an associate team member of NASA’s MODIS science team. Professor Barnsley held the post of Chairman of the University’s Technical Staffs Working Group and chaired the University’s Environmental Management Strategy
A memorial fund has been established in Mike’s memory. Cheques should be made payable to “Mike Barnsley Memorial,” and sent to: St James Funeral Home, 31 St James Gardens, Uplands, Swansea SA1 6DT. Alternatively, donations may be made online. Account name: Mike Barnsley Memorial. Account number: 58036695. Sort code: 602141 (NatWest). All funds will be donated to Cancer Research and Footsteps www.footstepsuk.org.
I’m proud to have known Mike as a friend and to have worked for him for the best part of 7 years. He was instrumental in molding my skills and provided opportunities to me that I would never have dreamed of as a Geography Undergraduate.
The first time I met Mike was for a job interview at Swansea Uni. He took me on a tour of the Gower Peninsula for a chat in his miraculously clean Renault 21. It was a supremely sunny day, and Swansea looked like the South of France in the heat haze late in the afternoon. I think he was so good at Environmental Science that he actually set the weather for the day. I swear blind that after my first day in the office, some 6 weeks later, it never stopped raining for those 7 years!
I was sold on moving to Swansea from that very first meeting, and it wasn’t the place or the Department that did it for me - it was Mike (ok, and a little of Giles Foody, who was severely jet-lagged at my interview). His passion for his chosen science shone through in the day or so I spent in Swansea, to the extent that he turned my head from Glaciology and turned me on to the Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (aka BRDF).
As the research group grew under Mike’s direction, we needed to find more resource to replace our Sparc 5 and Sparc Classic kit. Sun were still charging a fortune for slower-than-pc clockspeed boxes and coupled that with astonishingly overpriced storage costs. Fortuitously, this was around about the time that Slackware came on the scene - and true to the kind of weirdos we were, we spent a whole Sunday in the office performing our first Slackware install from 80+ 3.5″ floppies. Those were the days.We eventually managed to replace our 4 Sparc 5s with 10 dual-cpu Redhat workstations. Mike was all about openness and fairness and so Opensource and Linux ended up being a core part of what the Research Group were all about. The last conversation I had with Mike back in November ended up drifting on to issues to do with Ubuntu - I can hardly remember a conversation where we didn’t get on to tech, gadgets or Linux 
[ask Mrs Breadedcod - she got the brunt of it].
Actually - the Mrs Breadedcod angle is actually very important here. Mike was instrumental, albeit not through design, in the eventual hook up between myself and my better half. Our family life today stands as a testament to the supportive environment we met in and I’m pleased that Mike managed to share some time with our eldest child. It’s a real shame that he never got the opportunity to meet the youngest - everything was just stacked against us over the summer months and our oft-planned meeting up just never came off.
During a change in my job towards the end of October, Mike took the time to put together a reference for me and we shared a joke about jobs and him saying ‘you want the usual don’t touch with a bargepole number?’ He still managed to be the only one of three referees to get the paperwork back in on time.
Our very last conversation piece, somewhat ironically, was about bikes. Mike took to cycling over the past couple of years - I guess because so many people have been through the doors of Geography at Swansea and raved about being soaking wet through and caked up to the nines - but always with a ridiculously oversized grin on their faces. The irony stems from the fact that it was Mike who put me on to the possibilities presented by the Kona PhD. He bought a Kona PhD (also the white one) in 2006 and raved about it.
So there we go. I could go on and on. I won’t (but that’s not to say I won’t again). Suffice it to say that I wish I didn’t have to stop. Like many, I wish I could have more to tell, and remain completely devastated that this isn’t to be.
I’ll end with a seemingly random set of tags - they’re not random, they’re a sort of tag cloud of meaning for our good fortune to have known Mike.
Fimo Ducks, Curry, Pasta, Red Wine, Coffee, Single Malt, Jesus’ Blood, Man in a Room Gambling, Arsenal, Phillip Glass, Linux, BRDF, Graph Theory, ENVMOD, the book.
Tags: Arsenal, BRDF, catalyst, Coffee, Curry, ENVMOD, Fimo Ducks, friend, Graph Theory, Jesus' Blood, leader, Linux, Man in a Room Gambling, mentor, Mike Barnsley, Pasta, Phillip Glass, Red Wine, science, Single Malt, the book