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In memoriam - Andrew Brierley

We are deeply saddened to inform about the passing of a great colleague, Andrew Brierley.
Published: 7 August 2024

​​​​​​Here, Paul Fernandes, a close friend and colleague of Andrew's looks back over his life.​​

Andrew Stuart Brierley was born on 18 June 1967 in the town of Rugby in the middle of England, famous for the school which gave the sport its name. His father, Stuart, was an industrial sales executive and his mother, Margaret, was a chemistry teacher; his younger brother, John, was born a couple of years later. Andy attended his local state school and in childhood suffered from asthma which curtailed his early sporting life, leaving him to go fishing in the local reservoir during his physical education lessons.  However, he excelled academically and developed a passion for marine biology. He completed his undergraduate degree in the discipline at Bangor University in North Wales in 1987. He then went to Port Erin Marine Laboratory on the Isle of Man, part of Liverpool University, to conduct a PhD on squid population genetics: this is where he got his nickname Squid and where I met him. He wrote several papers on the population genetics of various squid species in the Atlantic and the Southern Ocean, graduating with his PhD in 1992.  He also forged long-lasting friendships with a successful cohort of marine biologists. Amongst them was Jenny, who he later married in 1998.

Andy made the most of life on the Isle of Man. Despite being told by doctors he would not be able to dive, Andy, driven by his love of marine biology and endless curiosity, defied the odds and went on to complete over 1000 dives. On the Isle of Man, he co-authored a local dive guide to the Calf of Man and salvaged various bits off the wreck of the Dom Bosco fishing vessel. He also developed various other sporting passions such as climbing and paragliding.  After his PhD, he travelled around South America, helping me conduct fisheries surveys in the high Andes of Bolivia. 

In 1995, he settled in Cambridge where he worked for the British Antarctic Survey, spending British winters in the Antarctic researching krill. There he developed his interest in fisheries acoustics. Early publications included articles on noise removal, post-processing systems, and variations in calibration due to temperature.  His real passion was ecology, and he published widely on Antarctic krill.  In the late 1990s, he and I secured a grant to use one of the world's first Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) – Autosub. We first used it in the North Sea to study avoidance of the new noise-reduced survey vessel Scotia, publishing our findings in Nature. We then took it to the Southern Ocean and sent the AUV under ice for the first time. We discovered a high-density band of krill, several kilometres into the sea ice, speculating that this allowed them to remain free from predation by air-breathing mammals, which was published in Science.

Andy and Jenny moved to Saint Andrews in 2001, where he took up a lecturer's position at the ancient university. Shortly afterwards his two children were born: Abi in 2001 and Laura in 2003. He was a devoted father, instilling in them a love for the great outdoors and taking them on adventures all over the world.

He diversified his interests in marine ecology at St Andrews Gatty Marine Laboratory, working on the acoustics of jellyfish (with his PhD student Chris Lynam), and contributing to another Nature article on scaling laws of marine predator search behaviour.  We supervised a few PhD students together including Sasha Fassler who went on to do great things in acoustics in the Netherlands.  He also co-authored a marine ecology textbook. He became a full professor at St Andrews in 2008 and started working in tropical waters in Palau, Diego Garcia and later in Lake Victoria. Curiously he also became involved with the International Whaling Commission, publishing two letters in Nature castigating Japan's “scientific" whaling programme.

In his middle years, Andy developed a passion for endurance sports. He started running marathons in the early 2000s, then cycling and long-distance swimming. He naturally converted to triathlons.  He qualified for the World Ironman championships in Kona, Hawaii, for the first time in 2009, and he went on to compete a further four times. On one of these occasions, he took on the double – the Ironman World Champs in Kona, and then the Xterra World Champs in Maui two weeks later. By this time Andy and Jenny had separated, and after some time he met a fellow running enthusiast Kirsti, who was to become his soulmate. The pair would compete in endurance events around the world, doing 24-hour mountain bike events, extreme triathlons and cycling road races.  When an injury prevented him from competing on a standard bike, he took up the peculiar sport of stand-up biking (“Eliptigo"), competing at the 2022 world championships, he placed eighth! It was with some irony, therefore, that I discovered one of his little-known papers “Negative linear correlation between human lifespan and exercise intensity", based on an analysis of Tour de France winners.

His energy was not limited to racing. He continued to work on krill with his student and subsequent postdoc and good friend, Martin Cox; he also took on new topics such as the deep scattering layer of the mesopelagic zone and the prey fields of the great bowhead whales of the Arctic. He developed several projects on Lake Victoria, concentrating on acoustic surveys of fish at first, and then working on schistosomiasis. His academic record was exceptional: a search on Google Scholar reveals 212 articles to his name, an H-index of 53, and over 11,500 citations. But his legacy rests with the boundless enthusiasm he had for life and the mark he left on his partner Kirsti, his daughters, family and friends. Our own David Demer was planning a trip of a lifetime for him & Kirsti right towards the end, a visit to the Grand Canyon and tickets to see U2 at the Las Vegas Sphere. Alas this came too late, as Andy succumbed to a brain tumour and passed away on the 19 February 2024. 

Andy first attended ICES Working Group on Fisheries Acoustics, Science and Technology (WGFAST) in 1996.  Along with his students and researchers, he attended on many occasions since, contributing to several ICES Cooperative Research Reports. He was a loving father, partner, prolific scientist, an incredible sportsman, and an entertaining good-humoured friend to me and many: he will be very sadly missed by many of us, but fondly remembered.​


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In memoriam - Andrew Brierley

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