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Expert joined the Institute Geography and Earth Sciences in September 2004 for his Ph.D. where upon completion in the summer of 2007 he received a lectureship in remote sensing and GIS. Prior to joining the department, Expert received a BEng(Hons) in software engineering from the Department of Computer Science also in Aberystwyth. During his studies Expert spent a year working on location based services within the research and innovations department of the Ordnance Survey (UK), while the first year of his Ph.D. was spent working with Definiens AG using the eCognition image segmentation and classification software in Munich, Germany.

Expert is also coordinator for four open source software projects:

* Remote Sensing and GIS Library - a C++ library for processing spatial raster, vector and point cloud data in an efficient manor and over large datasets. This software library provide the community with direct access to our research.

* The Sorted Point Data Library is a new file format for the efficient storage and processing of 3D point data. Base on HDF5 the library defines a standard means of storing 3D point data with a gridded index allowing raster like performance for 3D point data.

* The SPD 3D Points Viewer is a 3D OpenGL viewer for 3D point data stored within an SPD file.

* The RSGISLib XML Editor provides a GUI linked to the rsgislib software library and allows the xml scripts of
rsgislib to be edited and executed while also providing useful templates.

His research focuses on the understanding of forest ecosystems in terms of carbon dynamics, biodiversity and the changes in these systems with the onset of climate change (e.g., drought) and increased human disturbance.

In particular his research concentrates on new and innovative algorithms for the segmentation and classification of remotely sensed imagery and 3D point clouds. More specifically, the work focuses on the segmentation of the landscape into scale dependent segments (e.g., tree crowns) for classification of forest structure, biophysical properties and species. Additionally, the effects of scale are being studied, particularly in relation to scaling
up classifications of high resolution imagery to lower resolution imagery over larger areas (e.g., landscapes to regions).