Dr Jack Hannam is 2023 – 2024 President of the British Society of Soil Science. She is a soil scientist specialising in soil data, digital soil mapping and soil health. Her research focuses on digital soil mapping, applications of conservation agriculture to improve soil health, developing decision support tools for planning soil and landscape decisions and the application of application of national and local scale soil data for policy and business applications.

She leads the LandIS team at Cranfield University, who are responsible for the national soil data for England and Wales.  Jack joined Cranfield University in 2004 as a Research Officer in Soil Systems. Before joining Cranfield she worked at ETH Zurich and the University of Liverpool on international projects related to environmental magnetism.

Jack is also vice chair of the International Union of Soil Science (IUSS) Division 1: Soil in Space and Time. She is an Associate Editor for the journals Soil Use and Management and SOIL. She is a passionate science communicator and has been interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, Sky News and BBC World. She founded Soapbox Science in Milton Keynes in 2015, a public outreach platform promoting women in science.

She teaches soil systems on the Agrifood and Water MSc programmes at Cranfield and supervises MSc and PhD students. She has developed and delivered advanced training courses in soil systems for NERC early career researchers and bespoke short courses for environmental science professionals.