NERC Council biographies
NERC is committed to being open and transparent, and so here we give some background to members of NERC's Council. A register of Council members' interests is also publicly available.
Mr Edmund Wallis
Chairman
Ed Wallis was recently the Chairman of W S Atkins (January 2005 - 2010) having retired from Powergen in August 2003, where his final role was that of Chairman and Chief Executive. Ed is also a Member of the Board of Directors, Birmingham Royal Ballet and a Governor of the Royal Ballet School.
Ed qualified in Electrical Engineering at the University of Aston in 1962 and in General Management Studies at Henley Management College in 1978. Ed was awarded the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Technology by Brunel University and Doctor of Science by Aston University.
Ed is a Companion of the British Institute of Management and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Professor Duncan Wingham
Chief Executive and Deputy Chairman
Duncan received a B.Sc. from the University of Leeds in 1979, and a Ph.D from the University of Bath in 1984, both in physics. He joined University College London in 1986, where he held lecturing posts at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory and the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering.
He was appointed as a Chair in the Department of Space and Climate Physics in 1996, and was Head of the Department of Earth Sciences at UCL from 2005 to 2010.
He was founder and Director of the NERC Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM) from 2000 to 2005 which, among other things, discovered the widespread mass loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and its origin in accelerated ocean melting.
He was Chairman of the Science and Innovation Board of NERC and, since 2000, the Lead Investigator of the ESA CryoSat and CryoSat-2 satellite missions.
Duncan became Chief Executive of the natural Environment Research Council on 1 January 2012.
Professor Paul Curran
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.
Mr Rowan Douglas
Mr Rowan Douglas is the managing director of Willis Analytics for Willis Re, the world's third largest insurance and re-insurance broker. He is also Chairman of the Willis Research Network.
After graduating with degrees in Geography from Durham and Bristol Universities and underwriting reinsurance at Lloyds, Mr Douglas founded WIRE Ltd, an intellectual broking company arranging research between financial markets (especially insurance) and academia. WIRE was sold to the Willis Group in November 2000. Mr Douglas has since held a number of senior positions with the organisation including head of e-business and executive director, Willis Capital Markets.
In 2005, whilst in his current post with Willis Analytics, Mr Douglas founded the Willis Research Network, which has become the world's largest collaboration between academia and the insurance industry, supporting university research in Europe, North America and across Asia pacific. The WRN undertakes research to evaluate the frequency, severity and impact of natural catastrophes, and develop private and public sector risk financing to share the costs of these extreme events across populations.
In June 2011, Rowan was appointed as a member of the Council for Science and Technology, the UK Government's top-level advisory body on science and technology policy issues, which reports directly to the Prime Minister.
Professor Charles Godfray
Professor Charles Godfray is a professor in zoology at the University of Oxford and is a Fellow of the Royal Society. Previously the director of NERC's Centre for Population Biology at Imperial College, Professor Godfray has participated in a number of NERC panels and advisory committees and is currently on the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology's Science Advisory Panel. He is a member of the Science Advisory Council for the European Institute of Taxonomy (EDIT), amongst other international committees.
Professor Godfray is a population biologist with broad interests in environment, ecology and evolution. In addition to his core work on fundamental environmental science, Professor Godfray has published in areas such as sustainable agriculture and epidemiology and recently co-organised a Royal Society discussion meeting, 'The Environmental e-Science Revolution' which brought together physical and biological scientists to discuss better ways of harnessing modern cybertechnology in the environmental sciences.
Professor Michael Lockwood
Professor Mike Lockwood is a professor of Space Environment Physics in the Department of Meteorology, University of Reading and an individual merit scientist with Rutherford Appleton Laboratory's Space Science and Technology Department (Science & Technology Facilities Council). Mike was previously a professor of both Space Plasma Physics and Energy & the Environment at the University of Southampton, Chief Scientist at the RAL's Space Science & Technology Department, and a guest lecturer for the University Centre in Svalbard.
He studied physics at Exeter University, where he also gained a PhD in upper atmosphere studies. His research interests are in the phenomena that cross the mesopause (a high-level region of the Earth's atmosphere) and how solar variability has masked the full impact of man's contribution to climate change.
In addition to several research council committees, Professor Lockwood has served on many national and international committees including the Royal Society, Royal Astronomical Society, EISCAT (the European Incoherent Scatter Scientific Association), the European Geophysical Union, the European Space Agency Cluster Ground Working Group, Geospace Environment Modelling and the International Association of Geomagnetism & Aeronomy.
Professor Georgina Mace CBE
Georgina Mace is Professor of Conservation Science at Imperial College London. Her research interests are in measuring the trends and consequences of biodiversity loss and ecosystem change. She led the process to develop, test and document criteria for listing species on IUCN's Red List of threatened species, and subsequently worked on the biodiversity elements of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and on the technical development of measures for the Convention on Biological Diversity 2010 biodiversity target. Recently she has worked on the UK National Ecosystem Assessment, is a co-investigator on the NERC Valuing Nature Network, and is an Associate Director of the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation programme that is funded by DfID, NERC and ESRC.
She studied zoology at the University of Liverpool and then did a PhD in evolutionary ecology at the University of Sussex. Following postdoctoral positions at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and University College London, she became a research fellow at the Institute of Zoology in London. From 2000 to 2006 she was Director of Science at the Zoological Society of London and Head of the Institute of Zoology. In 2006 she moved to Imperial College London as Director of the NERC Centre for Population Biology.
She was awarded a CBE in 2007, elected FRS in 2002, and was the 2007 winner of the international Cosmos prize. She has served on several NERC committees including Peer Review Committees and as a member of the Science & Innovation Strategy Board from 2000-2005. She is President of the British Ecological Society (2011-2013) and a member of the 2014 REF panel for Earth & Environmental Sciences. She was President of the Society for Conservation Biology (2007-2009) and is Vice Chair of the Scientific Committee of the international programme on biodiversity science Diversitas (2007-2011).
Professor Thomas Meagher
Professor Thomas Meagher is Professor and Chair of Plant Biology at the University of St Andrews. He has served on NERC's Environmental Genomics Steering Committee and the Defra Science Advisory Council (2004-2009).
He studied botany at the University of South Florida, Florida, and gained a PhD in Botany & Genetics at Duke University, North Carolina. His research interests include plant evolutionary biology, conservation biology and biodiversity, and public understanding of science.
Thomas has maintained a strategic perspective on science throughout his career and has served on funding panels for the US National Science Foundation, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and the Academy of Finland. He has also been actively engaged in science policy as chair of various workshops and task forces funded by the US NSF. He was Chair of the DEFRA SAC Epidemic Disease sub-group investigation into Bluetongue Disease (2008-2009), Chair of the 2009 Strategic Review of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, and is presently Chair of the Society for the Study of Evolution Education Committee and Chair of the NEOMICS Expert Working Group.
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).
Professor Julia Slingo OBE
Professor Julia Slingo took up the post of Met Office Chief Scientist in February 2009. Prior to that she was the Director of Climate Research in NERC's National Centre for Atmospheric Science; she held that post at the University of Reading, where she continues as a Professor of Meteorology. In 2006 she founded the Walker Institute for Climate System Research at Reading, aimed at addressing the cross disciplinary challenges of climate change and its impacts.
Professor Slingo has had a long-term career in climate modelling and research, working at the Met Office, the European Centre for Medium Range Forecasting (ECMWF) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in the USA. Her personal research addresses problems in tropical climate variability, its influence on the global climate, its role in seasonal to decadal climate prediction, and its response to climate change. Increasingly Prof. Slingo's research considers the multi-disciplinary aspects of the impacts of climate variability and change on crops and water resources, and hence the need to improve the representation of weather systems and rainfall distributions in climate prediction models.
Professor Slingo has contributed to the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change and to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). She has served as a member of several national and international committees, including the Met Office and ECMWF Scientific Advisory Committees, and in 2007 was appointed to the Joint Scientific Committee of the World Climate Research Programme. She is regularly involved in Royal Society activities, and in 2008 became the first woman President of the Royal Meteorological Society.
Professor Andrew Watson
Professor Andrew Watson is a professor of the School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia (UEA) and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He has been a member of several NERC committees, including the steering committee for the RAPID thematic programme, and contributed to the latest NERC Strategy as a member of the Earth System Science Review Group. He has also been involved with a number of international advisory boards such as the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Bjerknes Climate Centre, Norway.
Professor Watson's areas of expertise encompass marine biology, physics and chemistry, atmospheric and planetary sciences and Earth system science. He has extensive experience of leading large research groups specialising in marine biogeochemistry, originally at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory as a NERC employee, and since 1996, at UEA.
Lord Philip Willis (Lib Dem)
Lord Willis is a Member of the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee and a member of the Liberal Democrat Party; he does not hold any specific office within the party.
He has been Chair of the Commons Science & Technology Select Committee 2005-07, the Innovation, Universities, Science & Skills Committee 2007-09 and the S&T Committee again 2009-10. He was also a member of the Commons Education & Employment Select Committee (Employment sub-Committee) 1999-2000 and Chair Joint Committee on the Draft Human Tissue and Embryos Bill 2007.
During his time as member of the Liberal Democrat Party, he was Liberal Democrat Commons Whip 1997-99, Spokesperson for Further, Higher and Adult Education 1997-99, Principal Spokesperson for Education and Employment 1999-2000, Shadow Secretary of State for Education and Skills 2000-05.
Since 2010, he has been Vice-President of the Local Government Association 2010. He is Chair Elect of the e-Learning Foundation; Chair of the Association of Medical Research Charities, President of Yorkshire Society for the Disabled and a board member of the Foundation for Science & Technology.
His past career was as a head teacher of several comprehensive schools and as leader of Harrogate Borough Council (1990-97).
Ms Rebecca Willis
Ms Rebecca Willis is an independent consultant in environmental policy and practice. She convenes Green Alliance's Climate Change Leadership Programme for UK politicians and advises the Lake District National Park Authority on climate change issues. Previously, she was the Vice-Chair of the Sustainable Development Commission (2004-2011), providing independent advice to government, and Director of Green Alliance, the environmental think-tank (2001-2004).
Ms Willis is an Associate of Ashridge Business School, a member of the Strategic Advisory Committee of the Cranfield Risk Centre and an adviser to the Community Innovation in Sustainable Energy initiative at the University of Sussex. She has taught on postgraduate courses at the Universities of Leeds and Cumbria, and, while director of Green Alliance, represented UK Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) as a board member of the European Environmental Bureau. She has advised government, business and the third sector on a range of issues including climate change, attitudes to the environment, public engagement in science, and the environmental and social impact of new technologies.
Ms Willis holds a BA in social & political sciences from the University of Cambridge, and an MA in environment, development & policy from the University of Sussex.
Professor Marjorie Wilson
Professor Marjorie Wilson is professor of Igneous Petrogenesis in the School of Earth & Environment and Pro-Dean for Research in the Faculty of Environment, University of Leeds. Marjorie studied geology at St. Hilda's College, Oxford, the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and Leeds University, where she gained her PhD; in 1999 she was awarded a Master of Business Administration degree from the Open University. Her research focuses on the origins of magmas and the processes which cause them to erupt; this work has important implications for volcanic hazard prediction.
She is a Foreign Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science & Letters and in 2000 was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Uppsala, Sweden, as part of their Millennium celebrations, in recognition of her contribution to the geosciences.
Marjorie has served on evaluation committees for a variety of national and international organisations including the Royal Society, NERC, UNESCO, European Science Foundation, European Union of Geosciences, Science Foundation Ireland, the Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish Research Councils and the Italian Civil Protection National Service. She has been a member of the NERC Science & Innovation Strategy Board (2003-2007) and the NERC Earth Sciences Peer Review Committee (1999-2002). In 2010 she joined a Strategic Advice to Government in Emergencies (SAGE) group established to provide advice on the Eyjafyallajökull eruption in Iceland.