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SISB biographies

NERC is committed to being open and transparent, and so here we provide some background on members of NERC's Science & Innovation Strategy Board. A register of board members' interests is also publicly available.

Professor Duncan Wingham

Chairman

Duncan is Professor of Climate Physics and Head of the Earth Sciences Department at University College London. He was the founder and until recently Director of the NERC Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM).

He researches the behaviour of the Antarctic and Arctic ice sheets and sea ice, through combining the observations of ice motion and thickness changes observed using satellite microwave sensors with numerical models of their flow. His recent work has focused on the causes of the on-going drawdown of the West Antarctic ice sheet, and on unstable hydraulic connections between Antarctic sub-glacial lakes.

He is also concerned to determine how climate change is reducing ice thickness in the Arctic, and is Project Scientist of the European Space Agency 'CryoSat' and 'CryoSat-2' missions. He is Co-Chair of the NERC Polar Science Working Group and was previously Chair of the NERC Earth Observation Experts Group (EOEG).

Professor Alan Thorpe

Chief Executive

Alan graduated from the University of Warwick with a physics degree in 1973 and from Imperial College with a doctorate in atmospheric physics in 1976. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College for five years and after a short interval at the Met Office took up a lectureship in the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading in 1982. He became a professor of meteorology in 1991 and head of department in 1996.

His research involves the basic dynamics and predictability of weather and climate. From 1999 to 2001, Alan was Director of the Met Office's Hadley Centre for climate prediction and research. In 2001 he became the first director of the newly-established NERC Centres for Atmospheric Science, which is a distributed NERC Collaborative Centre involving over 15 universities. He became Chief Executive of NERC in April 2005.

He has been Vice-President of the Royal Meteorological Society and was awarded their L F Richardson Prize (1979) and Buchan Prize (1992) for his research. He was a founding co-chair of the World Meteorological Organisation's research programme 'THORPEX: A World Weather Research Programme'. He is an assessor on the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs's (Defra) Science Advisory Council and a member of a number of national and international science committees. Professor Thorpe is visiting professor at the University of Reading.

Professor Tim Benton

Tim is Research Dean in the Faculty of Biological Sciences at the University of Leeds, and Professor of Population Ecology. He has previously been on the staff at the Universities of Stirling and Aberdeen, undertook postdoctoral work at UEA and has a PhD from Cambridge and undergraduate degree from Oxford.

His research interests are broad and concern managing populations under environmental change; with much of the specific work concerning the theory of population dynamics and the practice of managing biodiversity in agricultural settings. The population dynamical work includes development of theory informed by empirical understanding derived from a laboratory model organism, a soil mite. Much of the farmland work involves interdisciplinary science, and Tim collaborates extensively with social scientists (from economists to specialists in cultural learning). Within the role of research dean, he has been exposed to a wide range of biomedical and molecular sciences and has developed a strong interest in 'systems approaches' (and is currently deputy chair of BBSRC's Integrative & Systems Biology Strategy Panel). He thinks ecological sciences can learn a lot from adopting many of the tools and approaches developed to look at intra-cellular interacting molecular populations.

Tim has worked on many different questions: from identifying the appropriate scale of management, to patterns of biodiversity in the fossil record, but all have at their core understanding how the environment affects behaviour and life history, and how the responses are summed across individuals to produce population dynamics.

Professor Paul Bishop

Paul is a geomorphologist whose research examines landscape evolution at two time scales: 104-107 years, focussing on the interactions between bedrock river processes, tectonics and climate in tectonically active and 'passive' settings; and 101-103 years, focussing on the interactions between people, climate and river processes, particularly in monsoonal SE Asian archaeological settings.

His undergraduate degree (1977) and PhD (1984) are in Earth Sciences from Macquarie University in Sydney (Australia) and Paul was appointed to the Chair of Physical Geography in the Department of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow in 1998. Prior to that, he was the Director of the Graduate School of Environmental Science at Monash University in Melbourne.

Paul was one of three co-proposers of the recently launched SAGES initiative (the multi-institutional Scottish Alliance for Geoscience, Environment & Society) and he is the leader of SAGES Theme 1 Landscape Dynamics. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2004 and is currently the Chair of Executive Editors of the Earth & Envionmental Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is on the Regional Advisory Board for the British Geological Survey in Scotland, and was the Chair of the British Society for Geomorphology in 2006-07.

Professor David Fowler

David currently works for the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) at their Edinburgh research site near Penicuik, as a Senior Researcher on the sources of atmospheric processing and fate of atmospheric trace gases. David obtained a PhD in Environmental Physics from Nottingham University in 1976 and has worked for CEH since 1975.

David's research career has included work on the major gaseous atmospheric pollutants, aerosols and greenhouse gases with a focus on the processes of surface-atmosphere exchange. He has worked on the long-range transport, deposition and effects of pollutants on vegetation and soil and has been closely involved with assessments of effects of acidification, eutrophication and photochemical oxidants in the UK and the development of policies to address the issues. More recently he has worked on the sources of atmospheric methane and upscaling of fluxes to a regional scale using aircraft. He chairs and sits on several international committees concerned with air pollution within Europe.

David has published over 300 scientific papers and book chapters. He was awarded an honorary professorship from the University of Nottingham in 1990 and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1999, a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2002, and was awarded a CBE in 2005 for services to atmospheric science.

Professor Jane Francis

Jane Francis is Professor of Palaeoclimatology in the School of Earth & Environment at the University of Leeds. A geologist by training from the University of Southampton (BSc, PhD), she was a NERC Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of London and then palaeobotanist at the British Antarctic Survey. She was an Australian Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide in Australia for five years, before taking up a lectureship at the University of Leeds. She became Professor of Palaeoclimatology in 2004, head of the School of Earth & Environment in 2006 and Dean of the Faculty of Environment in 2008.

Her research interests include ancient climates, particularly of the polar regions, the regions on Earth most sensitive to climate change, both now and in the past. She studies fossil plants from the Arctic and Antarctica to decipher greenhouse climates of the past, when forests, not glaciers, covered the high latitudes. The fossils provide a window into a world that may come again if climate warming continues at its present pace.

Jane has undertaken many scientific expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctica in search of fossil forests and ancient climates, in collaboration with research teams from the UK, Europe, New Zealand, USA, Australia and Canada. In addition, she has worked in the hot red deserts of central Australia as part of Australian funded research and in southern Patagonia in collaboration with colleagues from Argentina. She was awarded the Polar Medal in 2002 in recognition of her contribution to British polar research.

Dr Chris Gordon

Chris Gordon is currently Deputy Director of Climate Science at the Met Office Hadley Centre. He is responsible for the development of the Met Office's climate research strategy and for national/international collaborative activities. He obtained his PhD in Theoretical Physics from London University and subsequently joined the Met Office in 1979 as a founder member of the newly formed ocean modelling group. He led the Met Office's climate ocean modelling work for a number of years, initially at the Hooke Institute in Oxford and then at the Hadley Centre after its formation in 1990.

He has worked on various aspects of ocean and coupled climate modelling over the last 25 years. Recent past positions have included Head of the Government Meteorological Research Programme and Head of Ocean Applications.

Professor Gideon Henderson

Gideon is Professor of Earth Sciences and Associate Head (Research) of the Earth Science Department at the University of Oxford. Before taking up a faculty position at Oxford he was an Associate Research Scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University (US). He has a degree in Earth Sciences from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in Geochemistry from the University of Cambridge.

Gideon is a geochemist working to understand the long-term operation of the climate system and the role of ocean chemistry in the carbon and climate systems. His palaeoclimate research focuses particularly on the Quaternary and makes use of multiple archives (including marine cores, molluscs, and stalagmites) to provide high, sometimes seasonal, resolution information about the patterns and process of past change. This work strives to understand components of the climate system with particular relevance to the future, including changes in rainfall, sea-level, and ocean circulation. His expertise in uranium-series geochemistry helps to place these palaeoclimate records into a precise chronological framework.

This expertise also provides information about the rates of process in the modern ocean. In this area, Gideon's research focuses on understanding the cycling of critical micronutrients such as Fe and Zn in the oceans, and on the calibration of proxies used to understand present and past ocean processes. He presently co-chairs the international programme on marine chemistry, GEOTRACES. He also co-directs the 21st Century Ocean Institute (part of the James Martin School for the 21st Century) with a remit to understand natural and human imposed changes in the marine carbon cycle during the present century.

Professor Ed Hill

Ed is a Physical Oceanographer and a graduate of the University of Sheffield (BSc Applied Mathematics, 1981) and University of Wales, Bangor (MSc, 1983 PhD, 1987). He held academic positions at the University of Wales, Bangor and was Director of the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory from 1999-2005. He has been Director of the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton and Professor of Oceanography at the University of Southampton since 2005.

Ed's research interests are in circulation and mixing processes in shallow coastal seas with particular interests in density-driven circulations including cascading and frontal jets. Ed has served on numerous committees including as the first chair of the Governing Board of the National Centre for Ocean Forecasting, Vice Chair of the European Science Foundation's Marine Board, and a member of NERC's Executive Board.

Professor Michael Lockwood

Mike is a professor of both Space Plasma Physics, and Energy and the Environment at the University of Southampton. He is also Chief Scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory's Space Science Department (Science & Technology Facilities Council), 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.

Dr Kathryn Monk

Following a BSc from Durham and a PhD from Imperial College - both in ecology - and a post-doctoral fellowship in agriculture from Reading, Kathryn worked overseas for 18 years, in the Middle East, Africa, Far East, and South America. Her projects in conservation, development, and governance partnered all levels of society, from local communities to national business, universities, and top government, and were funded by donor agencies such as the EC, CIDA, and DfID.

Her last post overseas was in Guyana as director of the Commonwealth's main research institution, which focuses on economic and ecological viability of sustainable forest management.

Kathryn is currently the Science Strategy Manager for the Environment Agency Wales, working particularly with Welsh universities and research institutions, and links into both science-policy and science-business networks. Kathryn holds two honorary academic positions in British and Canadian universities, and sits on a number of research and knowledge transfer advisory boards internationally and in the UK.

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 CACGP (Commission for Atmospheric Chemistry & Global Pollution) and on the steering group of IGBP-IGAC (International Global Atmospheric Chemistry).

Dr Phil Newton

Phil joined NERC in 1999 as marine sciences manager, then moving to Deputy Director of Science and Innovation, through to his current role as NERC's Director for Science Delivery. Once upon a time he was a NERC-funded & Royal Society funded marine biogeochemist, and subsequently headed a modest marine research group within the French Atomic Energy Agency. Immediately before joining NERC, he spent five years in the private sector as an editor at Nature, with responsibility for the journal's environmental science content.

Professor Malcolm Press

Malcolm is Head of the College of Life & Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham. He was previously Head of the Department of Animal & Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield and a University Director of Research for the Environment.

Malcolm holds a chair in physiological ecology and his main research interest is the interactions between plants and their physical and biotic environment. His current work focuses on parasitic plants in temperate and sub-Arctic communities and parasitic weeds of tropical cereals in sub-Saharan Africa. Malcolm's other roles include presidency of the British Ecological Society.

Mr Tony Rachwal

Tony is an independent consultant providing advice on water and environmental innovation to academic, industrial and government clients. He graduated from the University of Birmingham with a 1st in chemistry in 1974 and worked for 32 years in the water sector, retiring as European R&D Director of the water utility RWE Thames Water in 2006.

His personal research and publications fields are in water, wastewater and desalination treatment technologies with a wider responsibility for managing internal and contract research in the UK and international water and environmental sector. Recent roles include non-executive director of the Construction Industries Research & Information Association (CIRIA), 2005-07, and water industry representative on the joint DTI / Defra Environmental Innovation Advisory Group (EIAG), 2003-07.

Tony was chair of the EPSRC Water Infrastructure & Treatment Engineering (WITE) advisory panel 1997-2001 and UK representative on the American Water Works Association Research Foundation research advisory committee 1995-2001. Current roles include trustee of the Foundation for Water Research, science advisor to the IWW institute for water research in Mulheim and vice chair of the charity WaterAid, Thames Regional Committee.

Professor Martin J Siegert

Martin Siegert is Professor of Geosciences, Head of the School of GeoSciences, and Assistant Principal for Energy & Environment at the University of Edinburgh. He is the current Chair of the UK National Committee on Antarctic Research, and the UK alternate delegate to the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research. Martin is also the co-Chair of the Executive Committee of the Scottish Alliance for Geoscience Environment and Society (SAGES).

Martin is a graduate of Reading University (Geological Geophysics, 1989) and Cambridge University (PhD, 1993). He has held previous lecturing positions at Aberystwyth (1994-1999), and Bristol (1999-2006) where he was also Professor of Physical Geography and Director of the Bristol Glaciology Centre.

Martin's main research interests are in Antarctic glaciology. His work aims to understand modern ice sheet flow processes and glacial history by linking geophysical information, especially from airborne radar, with numerical modelling. Martin is the Programme Leader of the Subglacial Lake Ellsworth NERC Consortium, which will undertake the direct measurement and sampling of this environment in December 2012.

Professor Geraint Vaughan

Geraint is Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Manchester and Director of Weather Research at the National Centre for Atmospheric Sciences (NCAS). His early career was spent at the Met Office, before joining the Physics department at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth in 1984 and then moving to Manchester in 2005.

Geraint's research career has involved many areas of atmospheric science, from his DPhil in mesospheric ozone, through stratospheric chemistry and dynamics and stratosphere-troposphere exchange to mesoscale meteorology and boundary-layer dynamics. He is an experimentalist, with particular expertise in lidar and radar vertical profiling, and applying these methods to studies of the atmosphere. He has also used in situ techniques, particularly ozonesondes and aircraft-borne instruments, to address such problems as gravity waves, turbulence and mixing. Recently Geraint led a field campaign to Darwin to study the impact of deep tropical convection on the composition of the tropical tropopause layer.

A recent President of the Royal Meteorological Society and currently an editor of Atmospheric Chemistry & Physics, Geraint has been involved in a number of international programmes and committees, and has published widely in atmospheric science.

Professor Andrew Watkinson

Andrew is Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and a Professor in the School Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia. His current research focuses on interdisciplinary aspects of climate change, ecology and coastal zone management, with particular emphasis on the science/policy interface.

Recent research includes the development of an integrated assessment tool for simulating the impacts of climate change on the East Anglian coast and studies on the effects of hurricanes and increasing sea temperatures on coral reefs, sea level rise on turtle nesting beaches and climate change on island tourism in the Caribbean.

Andrew trained as an ecologist at York and the University of Wales, Bangor before moving to the University of East Anglia. He was presented in 2003 with the Marsh Award for Ecology by the British Ecological Society and is a visiting Professor at Fudan University in Shanghai. He is currently a member of the CEH Programme Development Group, CEFAS Science Committee and Chair of the NERC/ESRC/DFID advisory committee on Ecosystem Services and Poverty Alleviation.

Dr Steven Wilson

Steven was appointed NERC Director, Science & Innovation in October 2004. The Natural Environment Research Council is one of seven grant-awarding Research Councils in the UK. Steven has worked for NERC for 6 years. In his current role, he is responsible for development and implementation of NERC Science & Innovation Strategy.

Prior to this, he was NERC Director of Earth Observation. During this period, he led the British National Space Centre Earth Observation activities, represented the UK science community at the European Space Agency (ESA) Council, and lately chaired the ESA Earth Observation Programme Board. He has also worked for the Met Office (1995 to 1998) where he developed and used simulators for future satellite instrumentation on the Office's Hercules research aircraft. Steven completed his first degree at St John's College, Oxford (Chemistry) and his PhD at the University of Bristol, where his research focused on molecular photodissociation dynamics.