Janine Schoombie is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pretoria (UP), in the Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering. Dr Schoombie obtained her undergraduate and honours degrees in Mechanical Engineering at UP. She completed an MSc at the University of the Witwatersrand and completed her PhD at UP in November 2024.

Schoombie worked at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research from 2016 to 2019. Between 2018 and 2022, she was a co-investigator and technical lead on a project with Professor Peter le Roux of UP’s Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, investigating the impact of wind on the terrestrial ecology of Marion Island. Schoombie was a co-supervisor for an MEng student working on the wind project; Prof Ken Craig of UP’s Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering was the student’s supervisor.

Between March 2019 and May 2020, as part of the Marion Island Wind Project, the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences employed Schoombie as a field researcher on Marion Island. “My job was to maintain field equipment and collect ecological data for several postgraduate projects as well as for my own PhD,” she says.

Schoombie says she really enjoyed working with Prof Le Roux and learnt a lot from him about managing a research group, from funding applications and budgets to logistics and various other non-academic duties that an undergraduate student is not usually exposed to.

The project on Marion Island is an example of cross-faulty research. Its official title is ‘Wind as an underexplored component of climate change’. Schoombie elaborates on the research.

“Marion Island is in the sub-Antarctic region, in the so-called ‘Roaring Forties’, and is considered a wind-moulded ecosystem. However, when studying the effects of climate change, one finds that wind is still understudied. The aim of the project was to look at the effect of wind on the terrestrial ecology on a ‘within-island’ scale. Wind data at this scale was not available, so we deployed 17 wind sensors across the island, and an MEng student conducted a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) study, simulating wind flowing over the island at the scale of metres. The CFD data was linked to several other postgraduate projects, mostly looking at vegetation, but also looking to find a correlation with the breeding sites of wandering albatrosses, if any, and my own PhD.”

Parts of the project are still ongoing in partnership with collaborators at the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town.

Schoombie’s doctoral research explored the aerodynamic limitations of grey-headed albatrosses and how fatal crash-landings can be caused by wind. Although it is a transdisciplinary PhD, the methods used were based mainly on engineering principles.

As for why she chose to conduct research at UP, Schoombie says that Prof Lelanie Smith of the Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering was her best option as a supervisor for her PhD as she really understood what Schoombie wanted to do and supported her vision. Prof Smith conducts research in the fields of aerospace engineering, aeronautical engineering and computational physics. Prof Craig, Schoombie’s co-supervisor, is an expert in the fields of wind engineering and numerical modelling, which forms a large part of her research.

Schoombie’s research was prompted by her observations of adult grey-headed albatrosses crash-landing in a valley below an inland cliff, which is a large breeding site on Marion Island. Her research, specifically her PhD work, contributes to our understanding of the impact of wind as a factor of climate change on endangered grey-headed albatrosses. As a long-lived species, any new source of mortality could have an impact on population growth.

“My goal is to look at the wind around this site and the birds’ aerodynamic capabilities to determine which prevailing wind conditions are the cause of these fatal crash-landings, and to determine whether this would become a problem with climate change, since we know the wind direction is shifting northward and wind strength is increasing,” she explains.

The three main components of this project were to quantify and spatially map the crash sites; get a geometry of a grey-headed albatross in flight; and conduct CFD simulations on the albatross geometry to determine the aerodynamic forces acting on them under different wind conditions.

A research highlight for Schoombie has been the positive feedback she’s received from ecology and engineering communities.

“The first article published that was drawn from my PhD work was in a well-regarded journal, Marine Ecology Progress Series,” she says. “I had very positive feedback from some prominent people in the polar science community. I also presented my research at the Aeronautical Society of South Africa Conference in 2023 and was pleasantly surprised by how interested the other engineers were, despite my project answering a biological question rather than solving a problem in aviation!”. A second article, detailing the creation of a digital model of a gliding grey-headed albatross, was published in Bioinspiration & Biomimetics.

Schoombie says going to Marion Island for the first time in 2015 as a field assistant was a life-changing experience.

“I developed an understanding of scientific work in other fields and Marion Island is such a special place. I did a lot of thinking in the field. My PhD brought together my great love of aerodynamics and Marion Island.”

Schoombie has two academic role models, Prof Lelanie Smith and Prof Emily Shepard of Swansea University in Wales.

“Prof Smith works very hard and has accomplished so much even though she’s not that much older than me!” Schoombie says. “Her passion for engineering education is infectious and I hope to inspire people in the same way that she does.” 

Prof Shepard is an expert in movement ecology, having made great strides in the  use of engineering tools such as computational fluid dynamics and wind tunnels to study the movement, distribution and energetics of birds. Schoombie describes her as a great mentor.

Schoombie hopes to continue contributing to our understanding of the natural world and how best to preserve it. Her research matters, she says, because it demonstrates how engineering and ecology can complement each other.

Her advice to school learners and undergraduates interested in her field is the following: “Regardless of whether you’re interested in engineering or conservation, don’t neglect maths, and learn to code as soon as possible. I know quite a few researchers who studied biology because they didn’t want to do maths any longer, yet most of their work involves writing code to run mathematical models to explain their data.”

Schoombie is an avid naturalist, and spends a lot of her free time outdoors, hiking and uploading observations of flowers to iNaturalist.