Palaeontologist and geologist Brent Wilson is a noted authority on the living and fossil microscopic organisms (Foraminifera and Ostracoda) of Trinidad, the eastern Caribbean Sea and the Northern Atlantic Ocean. He has published over sixty referred papers and book chapters, and thirty technical reports. He is also something of a polymath, being a prizewinning and published poet and a performed composer of classical music. Although hailing from the UK, he lived from 1989 – 1997 on St. Kitts-Nevis, where he taught high school physics, mathematics and geography. During his spare time there he studied the relationships between modern foraminifera living on marine plants and pollution. The story of his time on Nevis is told in his autobiographical international worst-seller Living on an Arc: A Caribbean Memoir.

He has lived on Trinidad since 1998, where he first worked for five years as an industrial micropalaeontologist for the oil and gas industry. Since 2002, he has taught and researched micropalaeontology in the Petroleum Geoscience Programme at the University of the West Indies. His research has focussed primarily on the ecostratigraphy – the stratigraphic changes in microfossil communities – of the last 16 million years and its use in high resolution correlation of sedimentary rock successions. In addition, Brent has studied the impacts of oil-drilling facilities on seas around Trinidad and hurricanes on fisheries and shores around the Leeward Islands. He has also applied micropalaeontology to solving geoarchaeological problems.

He has presented research seminars at a) the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., b) the Bedford Institution of Oceanography, Dartmouth, Canada, c) Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada and d) IFM-Geomar-Institute, Kiel, Germany, and in 2013 delivered a workshop on biostratgraphy in association with the Geological Society of Trinidad and Tobago, for whom he is a regular speaker. Brent is a Research Associate of the Smithsonian Institution of Washington, DC, a Fellow of the Geological Society of London and of the Cushman Foundation for Foraminiferal Research, the Caribbean correspondent for the popular magazine Geology Today and an associate editor of the Journal of Foraminiferal Research specialising in Neogene foraminiferal biostratigraphy and palaeoecology.