Ashley graduated with an honours in applied mathematics from the ANU, after a bachelor degree in maths and physics at Monash University. He is supervised by Callum Shakespeare, Andy Hogg, Andrew Kiss at the ANU, as well as Manita Chouksey from the Institute for Baltic Sea Research. 

When not running ocean models, Ashley builds and contributes to software tools that help make climate models (which can be notoriously hard to use) a bit more user friendly. 

If asked at a pub how to explain his PhD, he would say the following:

Internal waves, especially those generated by the tides, are known to be important for mixing water vertically through the ocean. Say we happen to dump a bunch of excess carbon and heat into the surface (oops), we might want to know how much of that stays near the surface, vs how much makes its way into the abyss never to be seen again. Internal waves play a significant role here, but unfortunately most ocean models, let alone climate models, have tides at all. Worse still, the horizontal resolution of most models are usually too coarse to even represent internal waves, and we can't rely much on satellite observations because in-situ missions are required to measure ocean mixing. However, as models reach higher resolutions, we're starting to resolve part (but not all) of the internal wave field. 

In my PhD I'm trying to find out what happens when these waves are partly resolved: where does the energy go? Does my choice of horizontal resolution drastically change how these waves behave, or can we trust what the model is telling us when we resolve some but not all internal wave processes?