London born Professor Yani Najman didn’t see a mountain until she was 12, then it was love at first sight.

“When I saw my first mountain, I discovered I loved them and have wanted to study mountains and be in them ever since,” said Yani.

Today Yani does just that as Lancaster University’s first Professor of Tectonics, specialising in how mountain ranges are created, and the impact this has on climate.

But Yani faced a challenge to become a scientist. “I’m a number dyslexic – maths is a language I cannot speak”, said Yani. However, she managed to get a place at Edinburgh University to study geology – and to be near mountains. She also started travelling further away, going on long trips each summer to Africa, South America and Asia.

“I discovered a huge love of exploration and adventure and learnt how much I also enjoy the cultural aspects of travelling.”

She also discovered the Himalaya - “the biggest and the best mountains in the world,” which would become the focus of her research.

A PhD followed, then a series of post-doctoral positions in Edinburgh, Canada and Cambridge, studying how and when the Himalaya were formed.

“We were trying to work out when the continents of India and Asia collided, and after that collision, how soon the mountain belt started to form.”

This involved fieldwork collecting rocks and sediment, often working in remote areas and developing countries. This can be difficult, but Yani relished the challenges – she was testing herself physically, intellectually and culturally.

“Before you can get yourself into the field, you’ve got to get visas, you’ve got to get yourself a driver, you need to eat food that doesn’t end up with you being sick. Normally you have to work with an audience as well - kids and adults come and watch. You get a semi-circle of kids around you, getting closer and closer, which is fine until you want the toilet and they all follow you.”

In a pre-GPS age, Yani relied on maps, but there were rarely good maps of the areas she went to. And she often had to go into militarily sensitive areas where using maps was forbidden. In India, a woman wandering around digging and picking up rocks near an army camp was seen as suspicious - she got briefly arrested for “hithering and dithering”.

The culture was different too: the simple things – like not wearing shorts or revealing an ankle when you crouch down – were relatively easy to manage, but other differences were harder to navigate.

“There is a fine line between respecting others’ culture and representing your own. I had a male field assistant, and if I went into a meeting, the other people would always talk to him rather than me. We decided that he would say, ‘no, she is the boss’.”

“I will not bribe, that was quite a big issue as well. I did make mistakes: I’d invite our driver to eat with us at lunch stops, but in their culture the driver doesn’t do that. If he had, he would have problems getting other jobs as potential employers might think he was ‘uppity’, my driver told me.”

Finding the rocks and getting them out of their host country was the first set of challenges. Then Yani had to date and analyse the samples, so she could work out where the rocks had come from and what minerals they contained. Having dated the oldest rocks containing a mix of material from both the Indian and Asian continents, she knew that the continents had collided, and the Himalaya had started to form by that time.

Despite the difficult conditions, the research was a success. Yani published a paper in the prestigious journal Nature showing how redating some rocks in Pakistan had implications for when the Himalaya were formed. And the geological maps she created included an area which had been the epicentre of a huge earthquake – so they were used to help predict future earthquake risk

She started looking at how mountain belt evolution has affected climate. “When you make a mountain belt, that affects climate in two ways: the uplift makes a barrier affecting the monsoon and rainfall, and the weathering of minerals takes CO₂ out of atmosphere.”

Despite her problems with maths, Yani was building a name for herself as a geologist, finding ways to compensate for her lack of numeracy. “Collaboration is the key and learning to have the confidence to express your weakness. I used to try to hide it because I can get very strange reactions from people, ranging from disbelief to outright negative comments.”

In 2003 Yani moved to Lancaster University, attracted by its good reputation for Environmental Science, and by being able to live in the mountains.

For the first time she was not only studying mountains but teaching about them too.

“I took dissertation students to the Himalaya and really enjoyed watching them learn to cope with that new environment, developing life skills and becoming more independent.”

She introduced a programme for students called “Get a Life”, which encourages them to “go beyond the academic, to make their CV sparkle.”

She has kept travelling to remote places, facing challenges in her search to pin down the elusive date when the two continents collided to form the Himalaya.

And she has transferred some of the techniques she uses to explore mountain evolution, to other parts of the world and landscape.

She achieved a lifelong ambition to get to Antarctica travelling to the region on an icebreaker, as part of a scientific expedition researching how ice sheets have responded to a changing climate over millions of years. “You can measure the rate of ice retreat through looking at when rocks were exposed to cosmic radiation”.

And she has used her rock dating and identification skills to work out when the Nile began. Yani and colleagues compared rock core samples from the Nile Delta, collected by an oil company, to rocks from Sudan, Egypt and Ethiopia to figure out when the river first flowed from source to sink.

“We found rock pieces from Ethiopia in Nile Delta sediments 30 million years old, so we know the Nile was running from Ethiopia at that time.”

Does she now know the answer to the question that has dominated her career – when the world’s highest mountain range was formed? Her most highly cited paper identified a collision 55 million years ago.

“But we are now not sure if that collision was the India-Asia collision or the collision of India with an island, before the final later collision with Asia.”

So the research continues.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been challenging for someone addicted to travel and adventure. But she acknowledges she was lucky. She arrived for a sabbatical at the University of Colorado in Boulder, USA, shortly before the pandemic. Biking, hiking and skiing were still allowed in the local mountains, which kept her sane. She stayed on when her sabbatical finished to take advantage of this, teaching online in the middle of the night.

Her research in Boulder was with Peter Molnar, one of the world’s most eminent geophysicists, using Himalayan rock samples collected 20 years ago by a Czech climbing expedition as they travelled from the valley to over 7,000 metres. “It’s rare to get a vertical profile like this. We are analysing the rocks to work out how quickly the mountains rose up.”

Now back in Lancaster, Yani’s latest project involves comparing Himalayan river sediment from the Indian ocean, which she collected a few years ago, with modern river sediment in the mountain range, requiring fieldwork in India, Nepal and Tibet. Covid-19 has prevented her from getting back there so far but she is hopeful it will happen soon.

“I smell travel, it’s back, the call is pulling me again,” she says.