Prof. Jack Hannam is Immediate Past-President of the ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ, following her presidency from 2023 – 2024. 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.
Jack joined the Natural Resources Institute at the University of Greenwich in September 2025 as the Head of Agriculture, Health and Environment Department. She was previously Professor in Pedology at Cranfield University leading the Land Information System and Soil Informatics team. Prior to her time at Cranfield, she held research positions at ETH Zurich and the University of Liverpool.
Jack’s research focuses on soil data, soil health, land use change, regenerative agriculture and soil policy. It has included digital soil mapping using AI to predict and map soil properties, modelling agricultural land capability under climate change, and developing new frameworks for soil health indicators. She is interested in how different forms of soil data and soil knowledge can be integrated into model and analysis frameworks to inform local sustainable soil management, land use decisions and national monitoring schemes to track soil health. She works in transdisciplinary teams developing new concepts in soil and land systems and translates these into evidence for decision making.
She works at the science-policy interface providing expert evidence in government inquiries and has co-developed new policy with soil policy teams. Jack is a member of the Natural England (NE) Science Advisory Committee, an independent committee tasked with ensuring NE’s work is based on sound science and evidence. Jack is a member of the Centre for Art and Ecology at Goldsmiths focusing on practice-led interdisciplinary artistic research to support liveable ecosystems. She co-founded Soapbox Science Milton Keynes a public engagement platform spotlighting women in science, been interviewed on broadcast media (Countryfile, BBC R4 Today Programme, Sky News and BBC World) and has contributed to podcasts and trade journals.