Rate My Professor Paul Denys

Dr Paul H. Denys serves as a Senior Lecturer in the School of Surveying, part of the Division of Sciences at the University of Otago, a position he has held since joining the institution in June 1995. His academic journey began with a BSc from the University of Canterbury, followed by an MSurv degree from the University of Otago in 1987. He then pursued a PhD at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, completing it in 1995 with a thesis on height determination using ground-based transponders in conjunction with the radar altimeter on the ERS-1 remote sensing satellite. Before his current role, Denys lectured for six months at the University of Cape Town, worked as a site engineer in London, performed traditional and GPS control surveys in Egypt's oil and exploration industry, acted as a Research Associate at Newcastle processing precise GPS networks for projects in Greece, Europe, and Britain, and contributed to GPS-related projects for the offshore oil industry with Racal Survey across the Middle East, Far East, and Europe.

Denys' research focuses on geodesy, precise GPS and global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), earth deformation, sea level rise, and vertical land motion. He is involved in significant projects such as the Southern Alps Geodetic Experiment (SAGENZ), which uses continuous GPS to measure uplift rates and distribution in the Southern Alps; studies on co-seismic and post-seismic deformation following the 2009 Mw 7.8 Fiordland earthquake; monitoring land movement at New Zealand's long-record tide gauges to inform sea level rise assessments; and mapping strain and velocity fields across the South Island using GPS. His scholarly contributions include high-impact publications like "Complex multifault rupture during the 2016 Mw 7.8 Kaikōura earthquake, New Zealand" in Science (2017, Hamling et al.), "New Zealand GPS velocity field: 1995–2013" in New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics (2016, Beavan et al.), "A geodetic study of the Alpine Fault through South Westland" (2018, Page et al.), and recent works on GNSS RTK accuracy and vertical land motion in Eastern Indonesia (2025). In teaching, he coordinates SURV202 Survey Mathematics, SURV301 Survey Methods, and SURV451 Advanced Survey Methods.