March 11, 2026
Profile photo of Dr Mike Tetley
In this article, we speak with Dr Mike Tetley, Team Lead for the Ice Sheet Modelling team at ACCESS-NRI.
Where did you grow up, and how did you come to be part of the ACCESS-NRI team?
I grew up in the northern suburbs of Sydney, Australia. I studied music after leaving school, which ended up taking me around the world as a musician, before returning to Australia and starting a science degree 10 years later.
I first became aware of ACCESS-NRI when I was living in the UK. I received an email out of the blue late 2022 from an old research colleague who had recently joined this brand-new organisation called ACCESS-NRI as one of the team leads and was asking if I was interested in becoming involved. As it turned out, the email arrived with great timing, and I started working with the Model Evaluation and Diagnostics team in early 2023, before moving to the newly formed Ice Sheet Modelling team in mid 2024.
Tell us a bit about your career before joining ACCESS-NRI.
I came to ACCESS-NRI from a planetary sciences background (geology, geophysics and astronomy), with a research focus on palaeomagnetics, global tectonics modelling and remote sensing.
Over the last 15 years I’ve been fortunate enough to have been part of a number of exciting research projects and groups including the Potential Fields Research Group (CSIRO), EarthByte (University of Sydney), the Mars Science Laboratory (NASA/JPL), AUGURY and ePlanets (University of Lyon), Seismological Laboratory (Caltech) and the Jackson School of Geosciences Geodynamics and Tectonics Team (UT/UTIG).
What do you do at ACCESS-NRI, and what excites you about this work?
I’m the Team Lead for Ice Sheet Modelling team here at ACCESS-NRI. Working closely with project partners at Monash University, University of Tasmania and the Australian Antarctic Division, our main responsibility is to support the integration of the Ice-sheet and Sea-level System Model (ISSM) into the ACCESS community framework. This includes several areas of focus, from the development of open-source community software infrastructure such as the ISSM Python API pyISSM and the Cryosphere Community Datapool (CCD), to the creation of community model configurations, training models and documentation, to the development of configurations coupling ISSM, ACCESS-AM3, and ACCESS-OM3.
As much of our work within the Ice Sheet Modelling team related to integrating ISSM into ACCESS is brand new to the Australian community, I particularly enjoy the technical challenges associated with designing and building these projects from scratch, as there is always something new to solve. I also really enjoy working with my colleagues, both within the Ice Sheet Modelling team and more broadly at ACCESS-NRI. We are lucky to have such a great group of people to work with each day.
What do you like to do outside of work?
Outside of work, I enjoy spending time with my family, mountain biking, playing music, rock climbing and free diving (although I don’t get to do this too often now that I’m based in Canberra!)