Dr. Benjamin Williamson is an Associate Professor at the University of the Highlands and Islands in Scotland, where he leads a renewable energy research group. His background is engineering and marine sensing, and research spans environmental interactions of wave and tidal energy, through to ecosystem effects of fixed and floating offshore wind.
His research interests include sensor fusion, hydroacoustics and developing subsea multi-sensor platforms to track the interactions of fish, seabirds and marine mammals with marine energy devices. He developed and deployed some of the first seabed observatories to investigate animal behaviour around wave and tidal sites. After working in this field for >15 years, he has a keen interest in developing novel sensor platforms to investigate biophysical interactions in the marine environment, such as using UAVs (drones) to investigate behavioural associations of top predators with fine-scale hydrodynamic surface features at tidal energy sites.