Audit Committee biographies
NERC is committed to being open and transparent, and so here we provide some background on members of NERC's Audit Committee.
Professor Paul Curran
Chairman
Professor Paul Curran is Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Physical Geography at City University London.
Paul studied at the Universities of Sheffield, Southampton and Bristol. During the 1980s and early 1990s he held academic appointments at the Universities of Reading, Sheffield and Swansea and was a Senior Research Associate with NASA in California.
From 2005-10, Paul was Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Physical Geography at Bournemouth University. For the preceding twelve years Paul held the positions of Head of the Geography Department, Dean of Science, Head of Winchester School of Art and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Southampton.
He has served on several UK committees, including the NERC Terrestrial Life Sciences Committee, Royal Society Working Party on carbon sinks and the RAE Panel for Geography and Chaired the HEFCE Higher Education Workforce Steering Group. Paul is currently a member of two Universities UK policy committees and until 2011 was a member of the QAA Board.
Paul has served on many international committees, including eight NASA grant boards and ten ESA science advisory and funding boards. He is currently Chair of the Universities & Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) and President of the Remote Sensing & Photogrammetry Society.
His research is in the field of environmental Earth observation from satellite and airborne sensors.
Professor Paul Monks
Paul is a Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry at the University of Leicester. He studied at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford before working at NASA/Goddard and the UEA in collaboration with CSIRO in Australia. He is a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry. In 2004, he was awarded the EU Lillehammer Young Scientist award.
His primary research interests are the scientific questions underlying: the role of photochemistry in the control of atmospheric composition; chemistry and transport, particularly the impact of long-range transport on chemical composition; the feedbacks between climate and atmospheric chemistry; organic complexity and the control of regional pollution and the measurement of tropospheric composition from space. He is also actively involved in knowledge exchange with the forensic, security and health sectors.
Paul sits on a number of national and international bodies. He is a Co-Director of the UK Centre for Earth Observation Instrumentation, a task leader for the EU-ACCENT network, a member of the Commission for Atmospheric Chemistry & Global Pollution (CACGP) and Co-Chair of the IGBP's International Global Atmospheric Chemistry project. He is a member of BIS's Space Leadership Council. He is Chair of Defra's Air Quality Expert Group (government science advisory committee on air quality). Until recently, he was also a member of NERC's Science & Innovation Strategy Board (SISB).
Mr Bryan Thompson
Bryan has held finance, planning and commercial directorships with blue chip multi-national companies operating in a variety of different business sectors.
Bryan is a non-executive director and chair of the audit committee for the Oxfordshire PCT, he is also a non-executive director of the Ministry of Defence Police & Guarding Agency and sits on their audit committee.
Bryan currently runs a business consultancy specialising in turnaround management of failing companies and holds other directorships in a marketing, a technology and a specialist engineering business.