Carolyn Ann Cobbold

Carolyn Cobbold is co-founder and leader of the Manhood Peninsula Partnership, located near Chichester, UK that has been responsible for the largest coastal realignment project in Europe that protects a town, other buildings and new wetlands.

Career Carolyn Ann Cobbold worked for around 25 years as a journalist specialising in risk management after a degree in mechanical engineering from Imperial College, London. In 2008 she returned to study at Imperial College London and gained B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in history of science. She then began research in the history of science and was awarded a PhD by Cambridge University in 2016. In 2017 she was invited to be a research fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge University. Her research interests are science and food in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In the mid-1990s Cobbold became involved in protecting the Manhood Peninsula near Chichester in southern England from flooding following a chance meeting with a Dutch spatial planner when they were both living near Chichester. At the time there was no co-ordination of planning for flood management, coastal defences and new house building. She led advocacy for local residents, businesses, councils and the Environment Agency to work together. She was involved in organising a one-week workshop in 2001 that brought representatives of local residents and British organisations together with planners, water and coastal engineers and ecologists from the Netherlands. This led to formation of the Manhood Peninsula Partnership. Cobbold was a co-founder and then volunteered as the partnership's Project Officer from 2001 onwards. The partnership worked on a comprehensive plan for sustainable development in the region that included adaptation to climate change, developed initially within the ESPACE Partnership and part-funded by the European Commission.

She is a council member of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry.